Who Doesn't Like a Woman on Top?

By Corinne Cunard

A woman on top—this phrase often brings sexual interpretations to mind instead of the idea of a woman’s influence in the workplace.  However, this is exactly the idea that Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls examines: the notion of a woman on top in the working world and women’s role in society in general. 

            The first act opens to a dinner party that Marlene is holding for infamous women of the past, from Pope Joan to Chaucer’s Grisilde.  As the ladies talk over each other and share their stories, it is apparent that they all share the same sadness of sacrifice.  Whether it is Grisilde’s horrible mistrusting husband or Lady Nijo’s loss of her children, Churchill’s play is refreshing because it does not simply bash men as the source of all problems in a feminist world; rather, the play more carefully looks at a women’s options and their choices or lack thereof.

            Although driven businesswoman Marlene could be considered the play’s protagonist, the women all share the stage as if to suggest their commonality of experiences.  The double casting of actors also serves as a reminder that women’s past roles are not so different from their present ones—the women are still the same except with a slight change of hair and makeup.  Yet this entirely female cast manages not to suffocate the audience with hyperfemmininty because the play revolves around the relationships women form with each other.

In a particularly awkward yet poignant scene in a barn, Angie (Marlene’s illegitimate daughter) and her friend Kit act out the awkward stages of puberty and growing into womanhood.  Angie herself is somewhat of a stunted woman, especially when compared to her birth mother Marlene.  But Churchill’s last comment on womanhood at the end of the play is perhaps most profoundly said by Angie in a single word: “frightening.” 

            For young women like Angie, the world is a frightening place because she has little charms or skills to sell her self off to an agency like Top Girls.  Churchill suggests that in order to be on top, a woman is expected to not only be smart, but also very pretty and fashionable, like the women of Top Girls agency.  Marlene’s wardrobe of elegant party dresses and cut-throat business attire clashes drastically with Angie’s simple worn out overalls, cut up shirt and torn dress held together with a safety pin. 

Churchill introduces Joyce, Marlene’s sister, as the other option or role for women at the time: a working mother.  Although Joyce might be considered a progressive female character because she is a single working mother, it quickly becomes apparent that she does not have an ideal life.  Rather, Joyce exemplefies the reality of being a stressed, over-worked and tired mother.  Even Marlene’s unhappiness becomes apparent as she argues with her sister about life choices and Angie, suggesting that even a “woman on top” still suffers from her choices.

 Yet what interests me most about this play is Churchill’s non-judgmental attitude toward the female characters she presents.  It is hard to dislike Marlene or Joyce for being the strong, yet extremely dissimilar, women they are because they both suffer.  Churchill offers the audience the female condition as being one stuck between “a rock and a hard place,” so to speak, because when women try to have families and maintain a domestic life or join the workplace, they cannot truly get what they want. 

I left the theatre feeling that this play accurately presented issues that confront women even in present times, and to have done so without seeming like an angry feminist, Churchill deserves credit.