Review: Top Girls

5 March, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House

To celebrate her promotion, Marlene has a big dinner with the girls - including such historical figures as Pope Joan; explorer Isabelle Bird; Dull Gret; Lady Nijo; and Patient Griselda - and things get pretty drunk and messy.

In the second half of the play, told in a much more realist vein in Thatcher's England, Marlene returns to the office for her first week as managing director where she deals with her colleagues, her runaway teenage niece, and her estranged sister.

Much like Churchill's Cloud Nine, I found this a play of two halves. The dinner party was not boring but I found its overlapping, shouted dialogue and its array of self-absorbed characters pretty hard going. The second half on the other hand was much more engaging, and I think allowed most of the actors to be shown off to much better effect than they were in the historical roles.

Like Cloud Nine before it, almost all the actors switch roles in the second half. But where Cloud Nine invited comparisons of contrast (black and white, woman and man, adult and child all swapping places) Top Girls asks you to draw the parallel, between Pope Joan who had to give up all semblance of femininity to rule and the middle-aged manager who's "one of the boys"; between Lady Nijo the Emperor's concubine who became a nun and the businesswoman engaged in an affair with a married man - to connect the lines, between all the restrictions and restraints placed on women that have changed, and the ones that haven't.

I found the second half to be uncomfortable but really interesting - Marlene and her sister and niece all occupying different standpoints on ideas of class and privilege, on motherhood and family. I really like how Churchill allows these women and girls to be complicated, to be full of contradictions and irrationality, which in turn makes them very relatable.

But I'm not entirely sure I enjoyed spending that much time with them. And I was annoyed that the first half, which had laid the ground for all of this, felt like it was such a struggle to get through. Wasn't there a shorter distance from A to B (the play as a whole is 2.5 hours), or a more entertaining one? I'm not saying theatre necessarily has to be fun or 'likable' to be interesting - but it really does help when the journey is taking this long, and when I felt like the point could've been made in much less time.

I didn't dislike the first half like I disliked the first half of Cloud Nine, that's for sure, so it was a more even and consistent experience - but I found myself asking if I felt the trade-off had been worth it.

 

Director Imara Savage
Set Designer David Fleischer
Costume Designer Renée Mulder
Lighting Designer Damien Cooper
Composer & Sound Designer Max Lyandvert

With Paula Arundell, Kate Box, Michelle Lim Davidson, Claire Lovering, Heather Mitchell, Helen Thomson, Contessa Treffone