36 Caryl Churchill: Top Girls

Dr. Milon Franz

Introduction

As an enthusiastic supporter of women’s rights and an iconoclast of modern drama, Carlyle Churchill is the most original and enigmatic writer of her generation. Churchill’s socialist feminist voice is indisputably the strongest of the era. She creates a contemporary feminist landscape where the influence of male power can be felt everywhere in society. In her most masterly work, Top Girls Churchill makes an original and daring attempt to demystify categories of class and gender in order to contribute to the political transformation of women. Its dialectics is wide-ranging, covering universal dilemmas facing women, but focuses on major themes of contemporary  life. The critique  of feminist  ambitions is a  clear central  theme  and  Churchill’s selection of women from the past and modern world shows sympathy for the feminist cause and disdain for the male oppressor. This all-female cast play which set in a particular historical and political context discusses the issue of what it means to be a successful woman.

Caryl Churchill – Career and works

One of the prominent playwrights of the post-war British Theatre, Churchill was born in London in 1938. When she was 9, her family migrated to Canada, where she attended the Trafalgar School, Montreal. The influence of her father, Robert Churchill was decisive in making her a writer. She returned to England in 1956 and attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. From there, she got her Bachelor Degree in English Language and Literature and was awarded the Richard Hilary Memorial Prize. She produced two plays, namely, You‘ve No Need to be Frightened and having A Wonderful Time during her Oxford days. In 1958 her play Downstairs won first prize at the National Student Drama Festival.

She married a barrister, David Harter, and had three sons. Looking after three kids, she experienced poignantly the struggle between a writer and a mother. During this turbulent period, she asked herself, “Are plays more important than raising kids? And she found out a solution to act as the primary caretaker of her sons and to write during the spare time. These struggles are reflected in the play Top Girls. During this time she wrote numerous radio plays for the BBC, staring with The Ants in 1962.The Judge’s Wife (1972) and The Legion Hall Bombing (1979) were her other works for television. Her stage play Owners came out in 1972 and she was the first female resident dramatist at the Royal Court.

Later she became involved in political and experimental theatre groups and in 1974 she wroteObjections to Sex and Violence which is considered her first explicitly feminist work. In 1976, in collaboration with a feminist theatre group, Monstrous Regiment, she produced Vinegar Tom, an examination of the witch-hunts of the 17th century that depicted the so called witches as societal scape goats. In association with the same group, she also produced Floor Show a cabaret that attempted to reverse the sexism usually associated with that genre.

The long working relationship with the director, Max Stafford Clark turned out fruitful with their production of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Cloud Nine (1979) was her first hit, winning  her  first  Obie  award.  Three  More  Sleepless  Nights,  Fen,  Softcops,  The  Striker,  A Number, Blue Kettle, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, This is a Chair, Blue Heart and the verse drama, Serious Money are also famous plays by Churchill. She also experimented with mix genres. Collaborating with the dance company, Second Stride On, she brought out Lives of the Great Poisoners and Hotel. The influences of pre-war surrealism, the post-war politics of Absurdist drama and the minimalism of Beckett can be seen in her works.

Top Girls

The play, Top Girlsset a new theatrical mode with its multiple experiments both in style and form. It initiated the principle of overlapping dialogue, a technique that became vogue in contemporary British Theatre. The non-linear narrative structure and multiple role casting have made it a thoroughly original and experimental play. In her ongoing analysis of capitalist patriarchal society, Churchill continually calls attention to the connections between its governing ideologies and actual material conditions. Grounded in such social realities, Churchill’s plays make clear just how difficult the fulfillment of her demands for processes of personal and social change must be-especially in the current environment of reaction, disillusionment, and despair. However, Churchill balances her recognition of the limitations posed by oppressive conditions with a uniquely theatrical expression of her belief in the possibility of change. While Churchill presents the structures of oppression through the narrative and thematic elements of her plays, she uses the formal elements of theatre to challenge the inevitability of oppression and empower audiences to seek change. Her application of highly theatrical techniques to the portrayal of grim situations results in a dialectic between imagination and material conditions. This dialectic confronts audiences with a dual sense of material reality and imaginative possibility.

Historical Context

Churchill was of the sixties generation (born in 1938), then a second-wave feminist, a socialist, anti-war and anti-colonial. The 1980s were synonymous with the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, and with the political doctrine of monetarism. It is important to understand that the ‘Iron Lady’, who declared that ‘There is no such thing as society’, stood for everything that Churchill opposed. Top Girls confronts ideas of feminism, the contradictions of which are embodied in Margret Thatcher. It discusses certain issues and dilemmas encountered by women in the historical context of the election of Margret Thatcher as the first lady Prime minister of England. Carlyle Churchill identifies a paradox in this political event. Even though it is indicative of women’s progress and empowerment, Churchill thinks that Thatcher’s, right wing politics favoured only the wealthy minority eclipsing the less fortunate. In this event she traces a capitalist success over sisterly solidarity.

By portraying the political dilemmas of the times, Churchill compares and contrasts the lives of two sisters in the play. Through their struggles and conflicts, Churchill poses the following questions: For a woman, which is important– to make something of herself or to fulfil her responsibilities to family and community? How can a woman balance the demands of her career and motherhood? Each of the sisters in the play has different answers to the question the play asks. While one sister decides to follow a path that emphasizes her career at the expense of her family life, the other maintains close familial ties but continues to lead a life of economic drudgery.

Top Girls as a feminist play

Top Girls reminds us that Churchill’s artistic enterprise has not just been about challenging form and realist conventions; she has also always been committed to representing many different generations and classes of women on stage and has written some of the most provocative parts for actresses in modern theatre. Top Girls with no less than sixteen roles for women – usually played by seven actresses –offers some spectacular challenges to director and performer alike. Churchill’s preoccupation with the politics of reproduction and child-rearing, poverty, class, the rights of women and children, the meaning of success, and the dark side of capitalism, which are evident from the beginning of her career in the 1960s, resonate strongly in this work.

Chruchill saw in 1980s a decisive shift from a socialist mindset to a capitalist emphasis strongly affecting the concepts of female equality. She considers herself a social feminist, which is often referred to as materialist feminism, stemming from Karl Mark’s focus on economic relationships. The materialist position underscores the role of class and history in marginalizing and oppressing women. Churchill finds the absence of solidarity and sisterhood among women. Not only are all women, not sisters, but women in the privileged class actually oppress women in the working class. This lack of sisterhood can be easily traced in the characters of Thatcher and Marlene. Although both women could be seen as having achieved success from a bourgeois feminist perspective, they engage in intra gender oppression of their working- class counterparts. Churchill says about Thatcher, “She may be a woman but she isn’t a sister, she may be a sister but she isn’t a comrade. And, in fact, things have got much worse for women under Thatcher.

The  first  act  depicts  a  trans  historical  tableau  in  which  Marlene,  an  eighties’ career woman hosts a dinner party for a table full of disparate women drawn from history, literature, art and mythology including Pope Joan, who, disguised as a man, is said to have been pope between 854-856; the explorer Isabella Bird; Dull Gret the harrower of Hell; Lady Nijo, the Japanese mistress of an emperor and later a Buddhist nun; and Patient Griselda, the patient wife from The Clerk’s Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The next two acts present Marlene’s career and family life during the 1980s, with the last act being set a year before the previous act. In the first production, actors were cast as both contemporary and historical characters; a precedent which subsequent productions have followed. The solidarity of women becomes both a theme and a problem in the play. The historical figures of the dinner party in Act 1 can be seen as a context for Marlene’s success, a tradition of women who took risks and made their presences felt. Yet each is also presented as isolated in her historical moment, unsupported by a larger society of women and actively discouraged or attacked by men or institutions created by men. Similarly, in the ensuing modern scenes, Marlene and the other Top Girls are shown to have paid high prices in the attempt to succeed in a “man’s world” not established with their ascent or their needs in mind.

Perhaps  gender  equity  has  improved  if  a  woman  such  as  Marlene  can  rise  into management or Margaret Thatcher can be named prime minister. These advances form the basis for Marlene’s claim that women do not need a movement or feminist politics to move forward.

This seeming rise is potentially damaging to women; Joyce and Angie’s scenes show that, in Churchill’s view, most women face disadvantages and lack of opportunity and that the career track of Marlene is a rare exception, not a prototype that all women can follow. For every Lady Nijo or Isabella Bird, there have been uncounted women restricted in their options, left to obscurity and poverty.

For every Marlene, there are many women like the three job applicants: underqualified, unconfident, and lacking the rare combination of intelligence, beauty, drive, and style that have propelled Marlene. Marlene offers to help them, and companies pay her well to do so, but the women must play by her rules—for example, keeping quiet about plans to marry someday. Remaking women in her own image is the key to Marlene’s success, and supposedly to theirs. Aggressive confidence and the power to persuade employers and sales clients are methods recognized  by  the  men  with  whom  such  women  must  work  and  against  whom  they  must compete. Yet even the women who manage to “beat” the patriarchal system are merely outwitting it, not reforming it to make the field fairer to all women.

The connection between economics and feminism is continually at issue in Top Girls. Women have traditionally been relegated to the private sphere of homemaking and parenting, and a woman such as Marlene, who dares not only to enter but also to insist on advancement in the public sphere of economic activity, necessarily embodies a larger, inherent cultural tension. Giving up her daughter, beating out other women, and living without a partner are Marlene’s particular instances of the larger disjunctions between women’s rights and the rules of capitalist society, as Churchill sees it.

Here the issue is not whether successful businesswomen are paragons of feminist victory or bloodthirsty man-haters (though characters in the play express both these notions) but whether these women, like all beneficiaries of capitalism, have lost much in the quality of their lives, even as they appear to reject economic subservience to men. Such women, like their male counterparts, have acquiesced to a system of domination and profit refined over centuries by men in power, and even if they benefit from it as individuals, they ultimately are complicit in the oppression of their own gender. Marlene works at eradicating the signs of inequality between women and men in public life, but she does not pay attention to the larger patterns of dominance.

This can take the form of Marlene’s competing subtly with her friends Win and Nell, her apparent neglect of her sister and daughter, or even the spiritual emptiness and despair behind her bright demeanor, glimpses of which Churchill allows at moments throughout the play. Thus Top Girls argues for feminism where women are to care for the weak and downtrodden, including  those  in  her  own  gender.    The  play  also  reflects  the  contrast  between American feminism, which celebrates individualistic women who acquire power and wealth, and British socialist feminism, which involves collective group gain.

Reference

• Churchill, Caryl. Top Girls- Student Edition. Ed. Bill Naismith, Nick Worral, and Glenda Leeming. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008.
• Tycer, Alicia. Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008.
• Victoria Bazin-“[Not] Talking’Bout My Generation”: Historicizing Feminisms in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls.” (2006)
• Rebecca Cameron-“From Great Women to Top Girls: Pageants of Sisterhood in British Feminist Theater.