The NT must address current crises, not revive historic ones
Top Girls National’s Lyttleton, London SE1
★★★★★
The country is experiencing the greatest political crisis in a generation – some even say since Suez. And what is the National, our primary theatrical debating chamber, serving up? A US drama about paedophiles (Downstate), Sondheim’s 1971 musical Follies (back again), a snappy but hardly essential revamp of
Tartuffe and now, joining the latter in the Lyttelton, Caryl Churchill’s feminist classic Top Girls – which has already had one West End revival this decade (directed by Max Stafford-clark, who staged the 1982 Royal Court premiere).
By far the biggest drama is happening over the river in Westminster. I can’t conceal my disappointment that the NT has failed to rustle up something broaching the subject we’re all talking about – our relationship with the EU. Nominally,
Top Girls – which anticipates the seismic effect of the Thatcher revolution – speaks to arguments still ongoing (not least among the diehard left) about the downside of the enterprise culture she ushered in. And during a renewed period of ardent feminism it usefully looks back to when the sisterhood began making strides in the male-dominated workplace. But there’s no hiding the overall datedness and familiarity of what’s revealed about British women’s lives in Churchill’s emphatically all-female play.
The monumentalism of Lyndsey Turner’s high-spec production, which pulls out the stops in terms of cast size (18 jobs for the girls here) and visually (thanks to Ian Macneil’s impactful sets) aims to underline the play’s landmark status; but after two-and-a-half hours, interrupted by a weirdly timed interval, I felt I’d watched an absorbing but hardly on-the-button museum piece.
If anything the most interesting aspect of the evening occurs at the start before Churchill fully takes her handbag to Thatcherism. Albeit an experimental writer from her earliest days, here she seems infused with the disruptive energy of the post-punk period. We’re introduced to the industrious, unsentimental and proto-thatcherite ruthless heroine Marlene (played with insouciant self-possession and Alexis Carringtonesque steel by Katherine Kingsley) at a surreal restaurant soirée to celebrate her promotion to the head of the Top Girls women’s employment agency.
Gathering around a long candlelit table to chink, drink and feast are five historical figures of relative obscurity: the Victorian explorer Isabella Bird; Lady Nijo – an imperial concubine from late 13th-century Japan; the apocryphal figure of Pope Joan, interloper in the Vatican’s corridors of power circa AD855; and two fictional presences, Griselda – medieval emblem of long-suffering wifely patience – plus Dull Gret, armour-plated scourge of outlandish devilry as depicted by Bruegel the Elder. Quite a girl gang.
Their exchanges are audaciously elliptical, Churchill making pioneering use of overlapping dialogue, even at the risk of bamboozling us. We dine on snippets of personal revelation attesting to individual courage and the distance travelled towards emancipation. Many of the turns sparkle – Amanda Lawrence as Joan is terrific, mustering a touch of Carry On’s Charles Hawtrey as she deadpan relays the entertainingly gruesome description of her surprise delivery of a baby mid-rogation Day festivities.
This quirky opener is the appetiser to fare that slowly declares more overt dramatic meat, yet gradually loses its zestful originality. We move past a drolly dislocated evocation of the calculating environment of the agency, in which prospective job candidates are brusquely and patronisingly assessed – typing-speeds an uppermost concern – to a showdown stopover in the rural home of Marlene’s dutiful-dullish sister Joyce (Lucy Black), the counterposed figure of socialist-minded compassion.
The enigma surrounding the parentage of the latter’s teenage daughter is cleared up but there’s little else to solve. “I don’t believe in class, anyone can do anything if they’ve got what it takes,” Marlene defiantly declares, shrugging off familial responsibility, insisting on a woman’s right to do her own thing. What we gain in clarity we lose in revelatory insight and the sibling rivalry feels more schematic than Shakespearean in intensity. At a less politically heated juncture, this revival would still serve the National well enough; but we’re in the mother of all messes, so it doesn’t. Until June 22. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk