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by Caryl Churchill, directed by Vikki Anderson

Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

June 26-September 12, 2015

Marlene: “I believe in the individual. Look at me”

Caryl Churchill’s now classic feminist play Top Girls (1982) is revived so frequently that it does not really need a festival setting to support a production.  Soulpepper revived the play in 2007 in a production by Alisa Palmer that was such a popular and critical success that it was remounted the very next year.  The Shaw Festival’s current production directed by Vikki Anderson does not reach the perfection of the Soulpepper’s largely because Anderson insists on forcing a concept onto the play that tends to trivialize the play’s meaning.

Churchill’s text begins with a now-famous scene of a dinner party celebrating the rise of Marlene (Fiona Byrne) over a male colleague to become Managing Director of the Top Girls employment agency.  Marlene’s guests include celebrated historical and fictional women from various places and times.  Around the table is the Victorian world traveller and travel writer Isabella Bird (1831-1904), played by Catherine McGregor, who visited such places unusual for a solo female traveller as Australia, Hawaii, the Rocky Mountains, Japan and Southeast Asia, India, Tibet and Morocco all the while ensuring her beloved sister Henny was cared for.

Another historical figure is Lady Nijo (1258-c.1307), play by Julia Course, who was first a concubine to Emperor Go-Fukakusa and later became a Buddhist nun and wrote down her autobiography.  Alongside these women from history is the legendary woman Pope Joan, played by Claire Jullien.  Joan, disguised as a boy to learn, remained disguised and supposedly rose so high through the holy orders that she became pope in 1099, only to be undone by giving birth during a papal procession. 

Two other guests are from painting and literature.  One is Dull Gret (Laurie Paton), a character from Flemish folklore, who is the subject of a painting Dulle Griet (c.1562) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.  It depicts a peasant woman leading an army of other peasant women in an attack on Hell.  The second character, Griselda (Tara Rosling), who arrives late, is from Italian folklore and was written of by Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer and Perrault among others.  She was a beautiful low-born woman married by the aristocrat Walter.  To test whether she try loved him, her husband Walter had her give up their two children and later sent her away supposedly so that he could marry a higher-born woman.  Her unfailing obedience to her husband was meant to be a model for all women.  The only two modern women in this first scene are Marlene and the Waitress (Tess Benger) who never speaks.        

Anderson ruins this crucial first scene by beginning the play with that now overused idea of showing us the actors preparing themselves onstage for their roles as if there were no dressing rooms backstage.  Usually, this directorial trope is to emphasize to the audience that what they are about to see is a play performed by actors.  Here, it has the extremely negative effect of undermining the intensional surrealism of the first scene by making it look like a costume party. 

Anderson also shows the actors helping each other with their costumes, wigs and makeup as if the show were a comedy about women cooperating with other women which is exactly the opposite of what Churchill’s play depicts.  Top Girls is often labelled as a feminist play but, in fact, Churchill uses the action to ask a more fundamental question about society: “What, if anything, has really been achieved, if women who gain power simply act like men in upholding a socially stratified society?”  Churchill sees patriarchy as only one component of the social hierarchy that includes class.  The variety of guests that Marlene has invited suggests that Marlene’s view of success in the world is limited since that there are many other, more fundamental ways of being a “top girl” that simply being awarded a head job over a man. 

Anderson shows Marlene and the others speaking with the Waitress in the first scene, but this is completely contrary to Churchill’s intentions.  Churchill wishes to show the irony of the various “top girls” of past and present, history and fiction, expressing themselves while the one person who is actually working during the scene is ignored and has no voice.

To separate the first scene from the rest of the play, Anderson adds another of what she sees as “boudoir” scenes where the cast help each other out of their old costumes and into their new ones.  Anderson may think that such a transitional scene reinforces Churchill’s theme of the roles we play in life, but it blunts the impact of the subsequent modern day scenes.  Churchill’s use of doubling roles already makes the point of role-play inherent in the work’s structure.  As if two of these “boudoir” scenes were not enough, Anderson inserts another one just after the intermission.   

Churchill’s anti-hierarchical stance is reflected in her non-chronological ordering of the post-dinner party scenes.  These scenes are divided between depictions of the dreary life of Marlene’s sister Joyce (Tara Rosling) and her daughter Angie (Julia Course) and those portraying excerpts of everyday life at the Top Girls agency.  Joyce’s life is made difficult because Angie hates her and idolizes her successful aunt Marlene, whose infrequent visits she views as holy occasions.  Angie is also somewhat developmentally delayed and enjoys playing with children like Kit (Tess Benger) who is younger than she is rather than children of her own age.

At the Top Girls agency we see how the job of Marlene’s female employees is to judge the prospects of other women, often adopting a male point of view as to how the women will get on.  We see overqualified applicants looking for a change and applications without qualifications hoping to bluff their way into a job.  Most pathetic of all is the scene where Mrs. Kidd (Laurie Paton), the wife of the man who did not get the top job, pleads with Marlene to give it up for the sake of his health.  The play’s disturbing climax reveals what price Marlene made others pay to win her freedom to achieve success and casts a bitter irony in retrospect over all that has come before.

Tara Rosling masterfully contrasts her two main roles – graceful and resigned as Griselda then beaten-down and filled with pent-up resentment as Joyce.  Catherine McGregor neatly contrasts the unconscious Victorian self-aggrandizement of Isabella Bird with the modern anti-Victorian view of Marlene’s employee Nell, yet McGregor reveals a steely judgementalism underlies both figures.          

Claire Jullien well inhabits three distinct roles, from the lofty, intellectual Pope Joan of the first scene to the morally lax employee Win in the office down to the cheeky, inveterate liar Shona looking for work.  Laurie Paton does similar fine work with her three roles.  She obviously enjoys playing the crude, monosyllabic peasant Dull Gret in the first scene and as well as the two scrupulous older women, her two polar opposites, in the later scenes.  Of these the more memorable is her portrayal of Mrs. Kidd, who begins with as much politeness as she can muster, clearly covering some inner turmoil, before Marlene’s ridicule unleashes the anger that Mrs. Kidd had bottled up. 

The two problem performances come from Julia Course, though they are equally the responsibility of the director.  All previous productions of the play that I’ve seen have at least tried to give Lady Nijo some of the formality of gesture and manner of speaking that would suit a high-born courtesan of the 13th century.  Julia Course does none of this.  She does not use the baby-step manner of walking seen in the onnagata in kabuki theatre, she does not hide her mouth when smiling or laughing as well-brought-up Japanese women still do and she speaks as rapidly as her Western counterparts instead of in the deliberate, courtly manner as preserved in female roles in kabuki. 

As Angie, Course captures her awkwardness and impulsiveness but no great sense of her being developmentally challenged.  We have to see this both because it points to Angie’s fate having been sealed before birth likely by being born to a mother who drank and because it makes Marlene’s judgement of her, “She’s not going to make it” all the harsher.

While Anderson managed the complexity of overlapping dialogue in the first scene with panache, she fails to communicate the ambiguity of the the crucial final scene.  We have to be aware of how upsetting the information is that Angie may or may not have overheard.  This can only be conveyed through Angie’s look and tone of voice, but Course gives us nothing.  Then, without letting this important moment sink in, Anderson switches too soon to her upbeat anthology of ‘80s pop music as if to wipe away the serious issues that Churchill has raised.

Those who have never seen the play before will enjoy the acting on the majority of the cast and the brilliance of the play’s structure and critique of the notion of success.  Those who have seen other productions, especially Soulpepper’s recent one, will find Anderson’s direction superficial and will know that the play can have far more impact than it does here.  Given the huge number of underperformed and unknown works by female playwrights, including many by Caryl Churchill, it’s odd for the Festival to ignore these for the sake for a play so well-known and frequently staged.  Theatre companies all over can and have done Top Girls, but who is there but the Shaw Festival able and willing to stage the likes of Susan Glaspell or Githa Sowerby?

       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) The cast of Top Girls; Laurie Paton preparing to play Jeanine; Fiona Burne as Marlene. ©2015 David Cooper.