Angie shows up for a surprise visit, and Marlene doesn’t know what to do with her. Back at the Top Girls Office, Marlene and her two now-subordinates conduct more interviews, limiting their prospects as Marlene did to Jeanine. After Angie returns and Joyce goes inside, Angie repeats her threat to kill her mother. Joyce is surprised, because she thinks Angie isn’t smart and has no prospects for the future, especially since she dropped out of school. Angie goes in, and Joyce talks to Kit, who wants to be a nuclear physicist when she grows up. They decide to go to the movies, but Joyce won’t let Angie go until she cleans her room. She confides in Kit that she thinks her aunt, Marlene, who visited a year ago, is her real mother, and she plans to go and see her in London. Angie tells Kit that she is going to kill her mother. Angie’s mother, Joyce, calls her to come in several times, but Angie ignores her. Both their mothers are uncomfortable with the long-time friendship, but the two girls are like sisters. In the next scene, 16-year-old Angie plays with her best friend, 12-year-old Kit. Marlene interviews Jeanine, who is looking for a job that will let her travel, but Marlene restricts her options to non-travel jobs because she’s getting married. Churchill’s postmodern, semi-surrealist, experimental structure in Top Girls created new theatrical conventions in terms of dialogue, non-linearity, and feminist historiography onstage that have become mainstays in British playwrighting.Īct II begins in the Top Girls office. It asks what women are expected to give up in order to achieve career success, ultimately suggesting that the vaunted gains in women’s equality in the postwar era may be illusory. Although the play largely eschews direct discussion of government or politics, it challenges those who saw the election as a feminist victory by considering the way Thatcher’s conservative capitalist policies supported wealthy career woman like Marlene, the play’s protagonist, at the expense of less privileged women. Top Girls was inspired by the 1979 election of right-wing conservative Margaret Thatcher as the first female Prime Minister of the UK. In 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. In the decades since, Churchill has written over thirty plays. Top Girls was a significant work that established Churchill as one of the most important playwrights of the late 20th century. It won the 1983 Obie Award for Best Play of the Year, and it remains one of Churchill’s best-known and most widely produced plays, often anthologized as a canonical contemporary play.
British playwright Caryl Churchill’s groundbreaking play Top Girls, which opened in 1982 both at the Royal Court Theatre in London (August) and Off-Broadway at the Public Theatre in New York (December), is Churchill’s second internationally acclaimed play after Cloud Nine (1979).
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