"On Stage: Top Girls"
Gord McLaughlin

What a play. What a production. Top Girls (1982) by British playwright Caryl Churchill studies the price that women pay for success. And it does so by employing a bizarre structure. The central story is that of Marlene (Megan Follows), a career woman who has just won a promotion to Managing Director of an employment agency. Yet the first act has her enjoying a celebratory dinner party with a handful of women from history — a bunch of "Top Girls" who have all suffered for their position. They include Pope Joan (Ann-Marie MacDonald), a woman who fooled the Church into making her Pope, until they killed her; Lady Nijo (Robyn Stevan), a 13th-century concubine to the Japanese emperor who was most fulfilled when being unnaturally submissive; Patient Griselda (Cara Pifko), a figure from folklore and The Canterbury Tales, who goes from serfdom to royal wife at the cost of her children.

As the ladies chat and get slowly inebriated, the rather clever dialogue becomes surprisingly affecting for such an artificial scene. Relevant themes are firmly planted, to be explored in the rest of the play, as Marlene's story unfolds in early '80s Britain.

The setting of an employment agency allows for deft scenes in which women are assessed for their workplace worth and told what will get them ahead. One of the best has MacDonald playing Louise, a middle-aged woman seeking a new career because no one has noticed her significant accomplishments at her old job — she made herself too invisible, too efficient, too deferential. (Diana Donnelly is great as her new-style career girl foil.) In scenes such as this, playwright Churchill offers efficient little lessons in power, but never at the expense of their dramatic believability — quite the opposite.

But even those are peripheral to the central story of newly promoted Marlene, who comes to grips with the dead-end small town she escaped and the family she left behind. The final scene between Marlene and her sister Joyce (Kelli Fox) is a masterpiece of acting and pacing. And in case this all sounds a bit too serious, it should be said that there are plenty of killer laughs along the way.

Supreme credit must go to Alisa Palmer. Under her direction, the oddball structure flows so smoothly that a fairly long play (three acts over two and a half hours) doesn't seem long at all. She deploys her accomplished cast with precision, drawing standout performances for the most part.

This may be an all-female effort (except for Kevin Lamotte's effective lighting), but it's not a pandering theatrical hick-flick. (See Anthony Minghella's Whale Music from around the same period.) Churchill, Palmer and company grapple with hard truths about the universality of women's tough choices, and they forge it into powerful drama.

Source: Eye Weekly

"Sisterhood's Past Still Relevant Today"
Kamal Al-Solaylee

The words of Margaret Thatcher are blown up and carved in stone for all to see on the set of Alisa Palmer's compelling revival of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls (1982).

Although designer Judith Bowden subversively changes their order, there's no mistaking Thatcher's words for somebody else's, or any point pretending they haven't left a lasting legacy on the social and psychic state of Britain. Here, for example, is her infamous view of society: "There's no such thing! There are individual men and women."

Yet what sets Palmer's Soulpepper production apart from the herd of Top Girls revivals is her intelligent refusal to turn the play into the political equivalent of That Eighties Show. (Insert your "This lady is not for turning" joke here.) The Iron Lady may have been the decade's prophet and anti-Christ rolled into one, but there's more to this Top Girls than Thatcher bashing or neo-conservative baiting. Every directorial choice Palmer makes emphasizes the universal and the ongoing as opposed to the specific and the past.

One can easily see how other directors have fallen for the trap of history which is ingeniously set up in the first act by Churchill herself. Top Girls opens with a very long scene in which Marlene (Megan Follows) celebrates her promotion to managing director at an employment agency with a lavish dinner where the guest list includes fictional and real women from the past (medieval to Victorian). The women's conversations tell sad stories that contradict the reason they've been summoned by Marlene: to toast the "extraordinary achievements" of this sisterhood.

While echoes of that scene of gender warriors reverberate throughout the remaining three acts, Top Girls is, in fact, the story of the choices and sacrifices that two blood sisters, Marlene and Joyce (Kelli Fox), have been forced to make as women in Britain's class-riddled society. Even if the F word is never mentioned, both are strong feminists. Marlene's feminism is rooted in the capitalist belief in individualism and self-empowerment, while Joyce's is more allied to socialism and the collective good. That juxtaposition of two very different women - one wildly competitive, the other altruistic - may, sadly, still be part of our world, but it's a structural weakness in Top Girls that 25 years of revivals and critical scrutiny can't mask.

This is where Palmer comes to the rescue. Again. I mean it as a compliment when I say that there's no grand concept at work in her production - which can still use some tightening in scene changes and endings. Instead, Palmer responds to the text's shifts in tone and style (from the fanciful to the gritty) by placing the emphasis on performance as a unifying element. In a play about the choices women make, this director has chosen her all-female cast very wisely. The acting talent on stage is simply astounding.

It's hard to think of a better choice for Marlene's ball-breaking executive than Follows. For sure, this luminous stage and screen actor plays steely disturbingly well, but few can rival her in those moments when the mask falls off and the tears come out. This is why her Marlene is not a spokeswoman for a generation but a complex human being who transcends time and gender. Equally impressive is the infallible Fox as Joyce, a woman whose flame has been extinguished by Thatcherite politics but who continues to be a firebrand all the same.

There is a similar attention to detail in the work of the remaining five cast members (Diana Donnelly, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Cara Pifko, Liisa Repo-Martell and Robyn Stevan), who play pivotal but smaller roles. As befits a play that begins with a dinner party, Fox and Follows may be the meat and potato but what makes this production a satisfying meal is the particular slant on womanhood each actor brings to the table.

This collective spirit is just one of the ways in which Top Girls resists the very ethos of Thatcherism that inspired its creation. There may be places where there is no such thing as society and where individualism trumps all else, but theatre ain't ever gonna to be one of them. It is, and always will be, about artists coming together to create something for a collective good, be it entertainment or enlightenment. Top Girls is a shining example of both.

Source: The Globe and Mail

"Crammed with First-rate Actors, Top Girls Dazzles With Wit And Imagination In The Upper Echelon Of Theatre"
Robert Cushman

Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is a play requiring seven superb female performers. It's come to the right place. The upper echelon of theatre around here -- what might be called the Toronto- Stratford-Niagara axis -- is crammed, almost to embarrassment, with first-rate heroic actresses. The top girls assembled for Soulpepper's production could hardly be bettered. It's a sobering thought, or maybe an intoxicating one, that they could be equalled, maybe two or three times over.

The play itself, which might be called the flagship British feminist drama if it didn't fly its flag at such an oblique angle, was first staged in London in 1982 and was a dazzler. It still dazzles, especially in its first scene, though some of its later passages have frayed a bit. That opener, though, is a feast -- of wit, imagination and other things.

Let us now praise famous women, a selection of whom from history or legend are assembled for dinner at a smart London restaurant. There is Lady Nijo, an imperial Japanese concubine who became a nun, played by Robyn Stevan with a delectable air of stoicism triumphing over deep sadness. There is Chaucer's Patient Griselda, given a tender-tough performance by Cara Pifko; she has in common with Lady Nijo the experience of being forced to surrender her children to demonstrate her fealty to her husband and the society he represents. Bringing us slightly more up to date is Isabella Bird, Scots Victorian traveller; her incredulity at some of the tales told by her medieval companions allows Kelli Fox to deliver the most explosively funny moment of the evening. Ann-Marie MacDonald is hilariously unruffled as Pope Joan who rose (probably apocryphally) to Peter's chair by disguising herself as a man and was only rumbled when she gave birth in the street during a procession, whereupon she was dragged off and, as MacDonald blandly recounts it, stoned to death. She doesn't seem, all things considered, to bear much of a grudge. Looking very grudging indeed at the end of the table, and hardly saying a word, is Liisa Repo-Martell as Dull Gret who, in a Breughel painting, led a punitive expedition into Hell. She looks slightly happier to be there, though, than the waitress; Diana Donnelly says not a word but conveys, while bringing the food and pouring the drinks, a lofty resentment of everybody and everything.

The party has been convened by Marlene, a present-day lady celebrating her promotion to boss of the Top Girls Employment Agency. Her guests are women who have inspired her but whom she has, in her own mind, surpassed. They reflect her own issues with career, children and siblings. The rest of the play shuttles, more or less naturalistically, between Marlene's office and her sister's home in Suffolk, the world she left to become successful. Megan Follows plays Marlene brilliantly, with a hard edge that never becomes a mannerism. She is the only actress to play one role throughout; the others recur in two or three guises apiece.

Alisa Palmer's orchestration of the restaurant conclave is visually excellent and aurally pretty good. (Some bits are hard to hear, even given the author's fondness for overlapping dialogue.) Her touch slackens, though, in the office scenes. Churchill is a superb dramatic writer --every scene, speech, line, makes a point and connects with the others -- but her language, unlike Pinter's, isn't the kind that brings its own style with it; the peculiar London brittleness, barbed and chatty, here proves elusive. The director has also changed a delicate structure into a fragmentary one by redividing it from two acts into three. Marlene and her colleagues may see themselves as beating the patriarchy but they're actually joining it, a point that's made in cartoon style when a young woman presents herself for an interview so intent on coming off like a brash young man that she practically is one. Here, more than anywhere, I missed the pace and poise of the original production.

This version surpasses the original, though, when it gets to the last scene, a squaring-off between Marlene and her sister Joyce. Some of their domestic differences seem to have been fetched up from old theatrical stock, and the way in which their political opposition is framed--one is rabidly pro-Thatcher, the other virulently anti -- now sounds dated. (It actually seemed simplistic at the time: not the issues, but the reduction to personalities. To be fair, I think the play's aware of that.) But the actresses, Follows and Fox, ride right over the limitations; playing consummately with and against one another, they give us the authentic feel of fury. Fox's triptych of roles -- taking in braw comedy, worried concern and outright blazing anger -- is one of the evening's triumphs, a magnificent performer handing out everything she's got. Repo-Martell is also especially fine when her Dull Gret gets reincarnated as Angie, the sullen and bewildered teenager who becomes a self-elected battleground for the sisters. Joyce brought her up but she's infatuated with Marlene and her world. Unfortunately, there's no place for her in that world, as Marlene herself brutally points out, plenty of children are getting left behind. The point, a good one if less than cataclysmic, is lightly made within the play's kaleidoscopic pattern, then driven home in a later scene that's chronologically earlier. The play's technical insouciance once made it seem like a masterpiece. It doesn't any more, but it still counts for a lot.

Source: National Post

"Top Girls"
Jon Kaplan

Soulpepper's production of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is pretty solidly built. What the construction needs, though, is more steel. Or rather steeliness.

The landmark 1982 piece focuses on Marlene, a woman promoted to senior management at the employment agency Top Girls. On the surface, she's making the move with a great deal of confidence; what's underneath - and what the play investigates superbly - is the sacrifice necessary for her to advance in a patriarchal society.

Sound feminist? Yes, but the play is by no means just a political piece, for it explores the parent/child relationship, friendship and the difficulties of bonding in a proscriptive society. Filled with tart humour, irony and sharp character portraits, it's written in a nuanced, intentionally overlapping style that suggests chamber music in the way voices emerge and recede.

The first scene is the splashiest, a theatrical balancing act with Marlene (Megan Follows) hosting an elegant dinner party for historic and fictional women who celebrate her new position. What you don't realize until later is that each of them has a history that reflects on Marlene's situation; listen for ideas about children, lovers, sisters, control, service, property and fathers.

The last scene is the simplest, a confrontation between Marlene and her sib Joyce (Kelli Fox) in Joyce's utterly inelegant kitchen that lays bare history, hurt and two very different belief systems.

If the opening scene is the play's intellectual head, the last is its beating heart.

Director Alisa Palmer stages both expertly, the dinner party constantly surprising with its revelations and odd contrasts and the sisters' meeting with increasing bitterness and despair. Watch how Judith Bowden's set moves from a world of fantasy to one of reality.

Many of the episodes in between work, too, for the ensemble members all have a chance to shine.

Fox makes Joyce an angry but sympathetic woman who's been shat upon too many times; earlier, her spunky Victorian traveller is brusquely efficient. Diana Donnelly shows the emotional emptiness as one of Marlene's efficient co-workers, while Cara Pifko turns Patient Griselda into an innocent whose eyes are finally opened.

Robyn Stevan fills her Japanese courtesan's smile with sadness, and Ann-Marie MacDonald is funny and truthful as an ebullient pope and a prim office worker who craves upward mobility. Liisa Repo-Martell's a comic delight as the dinner's monosyllabic Dull Gret; she later offers vividly contrasting takes on Joyce's daughter at two points in her life.

Marlene's the hardest of the roles, and Follows captures some of her qualities but not others. The loss is there in the final scene, but she needs a brittle quality from the beginning that's not apparent.

She reveals aching emotional truth at the end, though. Beautifully orchestrated by Palmer and the actors, the last episode's sharp dramatic crackle doesn't mask the sisters' tragedy.

Source: Now Magazine

"Girls Dragged Down By Rhetoric"
Richard Ouzounian

It boasts seven stunning actresses and a stage overflowing with fascinating ideas.

Then why is Top Girls — which opened last night at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts – less that totally satisfying as a play?

The problem isn't that the feminist content of Caryl Churchill's 1982 script has grown less relevant over the years.

Alas, much of still rings far too true, but we've grown more dramaturgically adventurous over the years and some of Churchill's once daring structural devices now seem less arresting than they initially were.

True, the opening scene remains a tour de force: a group of famous women from the ages – fictional as well as historical – get roaringly drunk in a London trattoria to celebrate a contemporary named Marlene (Megan Follows at her frosty, sophisticated best) becoming a "top girl" in the business world.

The overlapping dialogue and carefully choreographed comic confusion (bravo to director Alisa Palmer) get things off to a smashing start. You haven't lived until you've seen Ann-Marie MacDonald as a terminally tipsy Pope Joan, Robyn Stevan as the nobly weeping Lady Nijo, or Kelli Fox as the non-stop talker, Isabella Bird.

It's a magical scene, but what comes afterwards is basically a series of naturalistic tropes in which we see how much Marlene has "given up" to get where she is in life.

The writing of each individual sequence is solid and the performances are all superb (Fox comes back as two more characters, each more vivid than the last), but you don't seem to know why you're going from Point A to Point B.

And the script's one pivotal dramatic surprise has been telegraphed so far in advance that its actual arrival is sheer anticlimax.

Again, one has to appreciate the vigour of Churchill's rhetoric, especially in a scene where Follows and Fox as two sisters face on why they did (or didn't) vote for Margaret Thatcher, but in too many cases, it stays as just that: rhetoric.

You want to ask Churchill if people really go through life making speeches as frequently as they do in her script, even though the speeches can be electric.

Cara Pifko, Diana Donnelly and Liisa Repo-Martell are all equally as good as the other "top girls" I've praised already, but they still don't make this 25 year-old script truly take wing.

Source: Toronto Star

"'Top Girls' Is Top-notch"
John Coulbourn

In tackling a revival of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, Soulpepper has obviously taken a clue from the title when it comes to staging the 25-year-old work.

As a result, the production that opened night at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts is not only called Top Girls, but features a whole bouquet of them as well, at least if one is prepared to dismiss seven incredibly talented women -- eight, if you count director Alisa Palmer, and you most definitely should -- as mere girls.

Throw in the fact that Churchill's observations on feminism are as relevant today as when she first put pen to paper back in the early days of Margaret Thatcher's Britain -- alas, more a comment on the snail's pace of evolving social attitudes than on the playwright's enduring genius -- and it all still adds up to an evening of compelling theatre.

It's rarely more compelling, however, than in its opening scene, as a group of famous historical women, both real and fictional, gather to celebrate the elevation of a contemporary woman to their elite sisterhood.

After years of hard work, it seems, the elegant and polished Marlene, played by Megan Follows, has been promoted to senior management status at the Top Girls Employment Agency, and in celebration, she has summoned everyone from Pope Joan (Ann-Marie MacDonald) and Japanese poet and imperial concubine, Lady Nijo (Robyn Stevan) to Scottish adventuress Isabella Bird (Kellie Fox) and the long-suffering Griselda (Cara Pifko), whose life, it seems, was half fairy tale and half nightmare.

As dinner parties go, it's a bit of a free-for-all, as each woman competes to tell her story, all the while getting progressively drunker on Marlene's not-inconsiderable hospitality.

Riotously funny and often simultaneously deeply sad, it seems at first to be a brilliant scene setter, but in the end, proves to be a major challenge to both cast and director, all of whom must maintain its high energy, once the dinner guests have departed and the play returns to Marlene's workaday life.

Happily, this cast and this director are more than up to the task. Quickly jettisoning their historical gladrags, MacDonald, Stevan, Fox, Pifko and castmates Diana Donnelly and the always impressive Liisa Repo-Martell become denizens of the modern world.

Together, working through Churchill's highly episodic and often seemingly disjointed script, they sketch in Marlene's back story, recreating a voyage marked by often cruel choices between heart and head. While Follows provides a strong throughline, it is in these expository scenes that the rest of the cast gets to shine, as Palmer draws polished work from all the rest of her cast, most notably from Fox, who is, without doubt, one of the finest actors working the stage in Canada, as well as from Repo-Martell and MacDonald.

Clearly, Churchill at time of writing was distressed with the either/or choices between femininity and feminism that women have always faced in a male-dominated capitalist society, and even though the work is clearly set in Thatcher's Britain, it is not anchored there, save by Judith Bowden's intrusive and monolithic set.

Weighted down as it is by Bowden's polemical design, the play fails to fully address the universality of the issues Churchill raises, not the least of which is the role other women play in perpetuating historical inequities.

Still, what's important here is that this production of Top Girls, for all its minor flaws, is finally only a trifle shy of top-notch.

Source: Toronto Sun

"Theatre: Top Girls"
Christopher Hoile

Soulpepper couldn't have known when it decided to revive its successful production of Top Girls that the US election would give the play a peculiar relevance. Written as a critique of Margaret Thatcher's Britain in 1982, Caryl Churchill's play has a character refer to the Iron Lady as "Hitlerina," while now, south of the border, critics of Sarah Palin refer to her as "Cheney in a dress." What has been achieved, Churchill asks, if women who gain power simply act like men in upholding a socially stratified society?

The play begins with a dinner party celebrating the rise of Marlene (Megan Follows) over a male colleague to become Managing Director of an employment agency. Marlene's guests include celebrated historical and fictional women from various places and times. While Marlene's view of success is to take a man's place at the top of a command pyramid, the various experiences of her five guests suggest there are many ways to be a "top girl."

Churchill's indictment of hierarchy is reflected in the play's non-chronological ordering of its scenes. Job interviews at Marlene's agency with overqualified to pathetic applicants alternate with scenes involving Marlene's older sister Joyce (Kelli Fox) and her rebellious but slow-witted daughter Angie (Liisa Repo-Martell). A disturbing climax reveals what price Marlene made others pay to win her freedom to achieve success, casting a bitter irony over all that has come before.

The entire extraordinarily talented cast of last year has been reassembled for this remount. Again Follows' performance gradually reveals the brittleness of Marlene's façade and the hollowness of her life. Again Fox amazes with her performance of three utterly different characters. Repo-Martell is, if anything, even more intense in her roles than before. Diana Donnelly, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Cara Pifko and Robyn Stevan, all in multiple roles, create instantly memorable portraits. Even Alisa Palmer's Dora-winning direction seems more detailed, while the cast's mastery of Churchill's difficult technique of overlapping dialogue is stunning. So rich is the play in meaning and so well-directed and acted is this production that a single visit is not enough to appreciate both Churchill's achievement, and Soulpepper's.

Source: Eye Weekly

"Sisters are doing it for themselves"
Robert Cushman

The best parts of Soulpepper's production of Top Girls are better than ever. This includes the opening dinner-party scene, a festive gathering unlike any other in modern drama. (Or ancient drama, probably.) Marlene, who's just been promoted to managing director of a London employment agency, plays host to a collection of iconic women, real and fictitious, from earlier historical periods, whose travails and triumphs have, as she sees it, paved the way for her own success.

That's as may be. Marlene's trajectory and her personality seem brittle and superficial compared to those of her guests. Or maybe that's just the 1980s for you, that being the decade from which Caryl Churchill's play speaks to us, loudly if not always clearly. Anyway, what one responds to initially is the playwright's nerve in imagining such a scene, her wit in bringing it to life and the amazing ensemble strength of the performers. Their interplay in Alisa Palmer's production is pitch-perfect and fingertip-precise, especially when it comes to maintaining their lines of thought through the overlapping dialogue that increasingly dominates the festive board. What materializes is a delicate balance of acceptance and revolt. The most delicate of all is Robyn Stevan's Japanese court concubine, glorying in the small revenges she was able to take on her lord and master while accepting the system that he (literally) embodied. Broader fun comes from Ann-Marie MacDonald's Pope Joan, cheerily recalling how she was dragged from her horse and stoned to death when her gender was detected, and from Liisa Repo-Martell as Breughel's Dull Gret, virtually silent and stuffing unaccustomed delicacies, such as bread, into her bag as insurance against the bad times. And for total silence, there is Diana Donnelly's waitress, the only figure from Marlene's own time and a vivid reminder that, even in her world, not all girls are top girls. Or especially in her world.

The rest of the play rams this point home. It consists of short scenes from Marlene's own life and times, some domestic, some professional. The latter are largely devoted to interviews conducted by Marlene and two of her colleagues with prospective clients. These were always the weakest parts of the production (not counting its fragmenting decision to have two intermissions), and they haven't improved. They're written pretty much like revue sketches, so they demand absolute precision. The English accents are spot-on; this show's unsung heroine may be Diane Pitblado, the dialect coach. But the tone and pacing are off, and with them go the specifics of the question the play poses: whether these women, competing and sometimes succeeding in a male-dominated world, are taking on its worst characteristics (and thereby betraying the foremothers they boast about). It's a question that, in the Britain of 1982, had taken corporeal form in the person of Margaret Thatcher, whose famous words about there being no such thing as "society," adorn this production's set. There's no comparable figure now; we tried on the first night to close our eyes and think of Sarah Palin or even of Stephen Harper (ideologically a closer fit) but neither quite fills the bill. The play's politics are still pertinent, just as its form is still audacious, but neither comes as a surprise now.

Thatcher is explicitly invoked in the last of the play's domestic scenes; she's extolled by Marlene, excoriated by Marlene's sister Joyce (the perfect name, for some reason) whom Marlene, proudly metropolitan, is visiting in the rural village where they grew up. Joyce is raising Marlene's unacknowledged daughter Angie, who embodies the play's conflicts. She worships her glamorous, successful "aunt," but when she runs away to London, it's plain that London -- Marlene's London, anyway -- has no place for her. The Top Girls Agency could never find her a job; and Marlene (behind Angie's back, mercifully) is the first and coldest to say so. The scenes back at Joyce's place are brilliantly, suggestively written and brilliantly, suggestively played. First we see Angie hiding out in the backyard with a suspiciously younger friend: a hauntingly believable duet, this, between Cara Pifko and Repo-Martell, whose defiant, unhappy Angie is the counterpart of her Dull Gret, deserving more than the world will give her.

Then, earlier in time but in the play's last scene, there's the duel, bitter but shot through with the remnants of sisterly understanding, between Marlene and Joyce, whose idea of political protest is to scratch the bodywork of posh cars. Top Girls is hardly a detailed naturalistic play, but these scenes, with their echoes of past conflicts, serve notice that Churchill could write an excellent one if she felt like it. As Marlene, Megan Follows, the one actress to play a single role, has lost some sharpness of definition but still fires fiercely on all cylinders. Kelli Fox's Joyce, her voice and stance aggressively akimbo, is the final panel in a triumphant triptych; in the first scene, she's been Isabella Bird, a Scots Victorian traveller paradoxically devoted to her homebody sister, and in the middle, she's the begging wife of the male colleague Marlene has displaced, a figure who in one brief scene sums up any number of contradictions. All three characterizations are perfectly judged and perfectly pitched: vocally, physically, stylistically. If there can be a first in this cast of equals, then she's the top.

Source: National Post