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| Edinburgh : A&E : Theatre: Reviews |
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Top Girls -
Scottish Premiere. Playwright Caryl Churchill explores structure with fascinating results.
Here she has us build up the narrative of the only character who appears
in every act, Marlene , by starting at a Saturday evening dinner party
and then successively going backwards, in the second act we see the preceding
Monday and Sunday and finishing with the last Act, set a full year before.
The play starts with Marlene, recently appointed MD of the employment agency Top Girls, hosting a dinner. Daniela Nardini gives Marlene that attractive but thrusting edge women who succeed often exhibit. Her guests are not of this time or even century, amongst them a pope, a Japanese aristocrat, an explorer. All women who found different ways of living and all, Marlene included, got away from where they started. As they dine together they tell their stories. While we listen, they at times don't, becoming so preoccupied with their own narratives they speak across one another. Monosyllabic Dull Gret, from a painting by Breugel, contrasts her feisty, earthy nature well marked by Cait Davies. On the first night at times to the irritation of some of the audience those overlapping speeches resulted in a clashing cacophony of voices. Playwright Caryl Churchill intends such overlapping in this and other scenes, and it echos the way we speak in life, but contrapuntal rhythms could help comprehension. The first act is tricky, only Nardini, Davies and the silent waitress, Sally Reid, get its measure - the rest of the company acquit themselves better in the subsequent acts when they play more ordinary women. The set by Robin Don, with its outsized graphs projects into the auditorium. It is engineered to strikingly alter to suggest not only a restaurant and an office but a Scottish back court with a windae tae shout down tae the wains, and the inside of a council house complete with staircase. Also transforming are the rest of the cast. They turn into Marlene's work colleagues and clients and some become as well the ones she left behind. It's Sally Reid's Kit and Cait Davie's Angie both still living in Marlene's rural birthplace who are the real girls, one bright and likely to succeed and the other, simple and direct Angie. As the woman she knows as Auntie Marlene says "She's not going to make it." Top Girls has some excellent varied roles for female actors, and many of the lines pin up for all to see the variety of ways women have got something different out of their lives, and the very high costs they paid. Looked at this century Churchill's Top Girls isn't too long in the tooth,
as it dramatically reminds us about the individuality and variety of women.
But watching it more than a quarter century on from "Women's Liberation"
et al it reflects not only the contrasting life lines of working women
but also parallels those of modern men more closely, like I said at the
beginning the buttons have changed.
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