Top Girls: Analysis of Setting
"Top Girls" is a play by Caryl Churchill that explores themes of feminism, class, and personal ambition through its distinct settings. The primary location, a surreal restaurant scene, serves as a space outside of time where five women share their stories and experiences, highlighting their diverse backgrounds and the contrasts between their public personas and private struggles. This setting symbolizes the protagonist Marlene's feelings of isolation, as the lavish meal they consume starkly contrasts with the poverty described in other settings.
The "Top Girls" Employment Agency, run by Marlene in London, is depicted as a bland and colorless space, emphasizing corporate dehumanization and the gender dynamics at play, as it features only female managers in a traditionally male-dominated field. In contrast, Joyce's kitchen and backyard reflect a more grounded reality, portraying the working-class upbringing of the sisters and their family's struggles. The kitchen, typically viewed as a nurturing space, becomes the backdrop for intense debates that challenge capitalist ideals and familial obligations. Through these settings, Churchill intricately examines the impact of societal structures on women's lives, making "Top Girls" a poignant exploration of individual desires against the backdrop of collective experience.
Top Girls: Analysis of Setting
First published: 1982
First produced: 1982, at the Royal Court Theatre, London
Type of work: Drama
Type of plot: Social realism
Time of work: Early 1980’s
Places Discussed
Restaurant
Restaurant. Fictional space outside time and place with a table set for dinner. Caryl Churchill’s realistic dialogue, with overlapping chatter and constant ordering from menus, grounds this surreal scene in naturalistic behavior in order to humanize the five characters who act as the various thematic voices within Marlene’s culturally splintered psyche. All six women travel to find adventure or notoriety, filling the scene with “true” tales of exotic globetrotting, all of which contrast with the depressing conditions of the women’s home lives within their different social structures. The expressionistic space of the restaurant itself may be seen as symbolizing Marlene’s feelings of isolation and loss, emotions she hides in work and drink. The consumption of this sumptuous meal contrasts with the apparent poverty in Joyce’s home.
“Top Girls” Employment Agency
“Top Girls” Employment Agency. Business in London run by Marlene. The spaces themselves are nondescript and colorless, suggesting corporate dehumanization and lack of maternal succor. Churchill staffs them only with upwardly mobile female managers in what would usually be viewed as a masculine field. This gender shift and destabilization is underlined by the ill health of Howard, the one male manager, who, like all men mentioned in the play, remains firmly offstage.
Joyce’s kitchen and backyard
Joyce’s kitchen and backyard. Small house in a country village, the childhood home of Joyce and Marlene and their working-class parents, situated near the town of Ipswich in Suffolk, about sixty miles east of London. The damp house, the junk-filled backyard, and the nearby fens provide the play’s most detailed environment, to contrast with the smart, tidy London offices. This naturalistic specificity explores the effects that such an environment has on women trapped in social roles, both those who remain and those who attempt to escape. The kitchen, often used to symbolize the female space, is instead the site of a political debate between the sisters and a head-on collision between capitalist individualism and the moral responsibilities of family and class identity.
Bibliography
Cousin, Geraldine. Churchill the Playwright. London: Methuen Drama, 1989. This study views Churchill’s plays in the context of her experimentations with collaborative productions, in which the author, actors, and director research, write, and develop a play together through a prerehearsal workshop period. Cousin examines Top Girls for the way in which it manipulates traditional time schemes and questions notions of achievement, success, and what Churchill considers “joy.”
Fitzsimmons, Linda. File on Churchill. London: Methuen Drama, 1989. A comprehensive listing of Churchill’s plays, including unperformed ones, and selected review and comments from the playwright herself about her work. The general introduction and brief chronology are helpful. Includes a bibliography with selected play collections, essays, interviews, and secondary sources.
Kritzer, Amelia Howe. The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Written from a feminist perspective, this book opens with an overview of theories of theatre and drama and of feminist and socialist criticism in relation to Churchill’s plays. The chapter “Labour and Capital” analyzes Top Girls, Fen (1983), and Serious Money (1987) as characteristic of Churchill’s concern about the socioeconomic effects of Margaret Thatcher’s government and its conservative policies.
Marohl, Joseph. “De-Realized Women: Performance and Gender in Top Girls.” Modern Drama 3 (September, 1987): 376-388. Marohl analyzes the play from the point of view of the battle between classes, emphasizing the socialist aspects more than the feminist ones.
Randall, Phyllis R., ed. Caryl Churchill: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1988. A collection of essays, including one on Top Girls that comments on the challenge this play presents to feminists to realize that individual solutions are not successful and to confront the need to deal with the “larger contradictions created by a capitalistic patriarchy.”
Thomas, Jane. “The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Essays in Refusal.” In The Death of the Playwright?, edited by Adrian Page. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. This essay analyzes Top Girls and Cloud Nine (1979) in the light of Churchill’s acknowledged reading of Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977).