Shoulder pads at dawn in a top 80s revival
Top Girls (National Theatre, London) Verdict: Engrossing return to Thatcher-era feminism ★★★★✩
CARYL CHURCHILL’S 1982 play has always fascinated me. It’s about a tough-as-tungsten woman running an employment agency in the early 1980s.
It’s often seen as an indictment of the hatchet-faced individualism of that era. But it’s also a celebration of those years, as more women gained independence by entering the workforce.
Although not mentioned by name, Mrs Thatcher was the play’s elephant in the room.
She had caused widespread panic and confusion among feminists because as the UK’s first woman Prime Minister, she was also a Tory — and not on their side. But the great thing about Lyndsey Turner’s lively revival at the National Theatre is that it distils the excitement and foreboding of those unsettling times.
What the play never does is tackle its subject directly. It starts by imagining the executive heroine Marlene (Katherine Kingsley) hosting a dinner party for five great women from history. They include the victorian explorer Isabella Bird (a wry Siobhan Redmond), the 13th-century Japanese concubine Lady Nijo (a dippy Wendy Kweh) and the 9th-century Pope Joan, who gave birth in the vatican (a hilarious Amanda Lawrence).
Each has her subversive story, but the purpose of this brilliant comic set-piece is to big-up their host Marlene as being worthy of their company. Then it’s down to business in Marlene’s Top Girls employment agency. It’s a cold clinical world pushing women to ‘sell’ themselves for work.
THEN into these sharkinfested waters paddles Marlene’s goofy niece, Angie, who’s come down from sleepy Norfolk to bask in her self-serving aunt’s slick London lifestyle.
It’s in the play’s last half hour that it all pays off in a scruffy Norfolk cottage. Marlene has a set-to with her sister, Joyce, who scrapes a living with cleaning jobs after kicking out her cheating farmer husband.
It’s here we learn the price each woman has paid in her life: the sacrifices Marlene made to move on and the compromises
Joyce made to stay put. There’s a twist at the end that brings the weight of guilt and responsibility for both women rushing in like a blast of cold air. It made me shiver.
Monstrous as Kingsley’s Marlene sometimes is, you never lose sight of how she’s blinkering herself with booze and mantras about how the Eighties will be ‘stupendous’.
As her sister, Lucy Black is equally well observed. She slogs all day then looks like she’s longing to flop into bed. Any parent will recognise that look of folded arms and distracted eyes. But the real pearl of a performance is Liv Hill as Angie. Everyone except Joyce beats about the bush with the fact that she’s not very bright. She is the misfit who indicts Marlene’s world — and drags down Joyce’s. She is also a sweet and needy child, desperate to be loved. She is the opposite of a ‘top girl’, but needs to find a place on this Earth just the same. What does the modern world have to offer her? That’s the question that makes this play fizz and burn.