Shaw Festival
Through September 12
TOP GIRLS Court House Theatre/Shaw Festival
By Augustine Warner
There’s a price to pay for ambition, especially successful ambition.
That’s what Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” is about, ambition and the price of success.
Marlene (Fiona Byrne) has just become a managing director in a London employment agency, Top Girls, working her way up from the bottom.
To get there she has given up everything from her politics to her troubled daughter, everything.
From a Labor Party background, she’s backing the punish-the-poor Margaret Thatcher as prime minister and letting her daughter, Angie (Julia Course), be raised in her old, rural, small home town by her sister, Joyce (Tara Rosling), so that she’s Auntie Marlene.
She celebrates her promotion with an expensive dinner with famous women from history, like Pope Joan (Claire Jullien) Lady Nijo (Course).
They lament the price they have paid for ambition, from death to exile from the emperor of Japan and her children.
This is one of Churchill’s earliest plays and one considered a feminist classic.
It’s getting a glossy production from the Shaw, with Vikki Anderson’s direction and a set from festival veteran Sue LePage.
There are two problems with the show: it’s really not a very good play and the gloss doesn’t make up for that.
Anderson and LePage try to make up for the script with some really excellent staging, especially the opening with the women in white makeup gowns preparing for the dinner and moving around the array of wheeled tables which are everything from the makeup tables to assembling into the dining table for the women.
LePage’s rolling tables are a set highlight from the show.
Marlene and the other women in the agency realize they have paid a heavy price for success and when Angie appears looking to leave her home town, her aunt isn’t excited about helping her.
That may be why she heads home with Christmas presents for an unpleasant confrontation with sister and daughter.
That’s where we learn the shaded realities of Marlene’s life and that price.
I think Anderson realizes the problems of the show and that’s why the gloss.
She also has to deal with Churchill’s stage directions which leave much of that opening dinner unintelligible by allowing overlapping dialogue among the women at the table to the point it’s not always clear what’s being said.
There is also the issue that understanding British politics in Thatcher’s time really helps so you can understand what Marlene and Joyce are arguing about.
The show does offer a really strong performance from Byrne and good work from Rosling on that really nice set.
This is a Shaw season heavy with feminist issues.
It’s too bad “Top Girls” isn’t adding much to the issues under discussion.
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