Top Girls

There can be few plays so precisely designed to surprise. Dramaturgically, Top Girls piles surprise on surprise. Imagine seeing it for the first time in 1982. The first scene appears to show us a contemporary power-dressing woman, but then who on earth are these guests? And why are they talking over each other? Why can’t we hear their stories? Why are they so upset? Then, after 45 crazy minutes, the scene is swept away and now we are watching two teenage girls in a garden in East Anglia. Nothing they say seems linked to the first scene (how could it be?) until one says that her aunt gets people jobs - wasn’t the scene-one power-dresser working in recruitment? Things begin to settle down in the next scenes, which show us a series of brilliant vignettes of office life, but then finally we are back in East Anglia and we seem to be in a flashback, but a flashback from which we never emerge. It must have been devastating and extraordinary.

The problem for the play now is that some of its celebrated disruptions are now iconic and celebrated. Overlapping dialogue is widespread, albeit never used to the punishing and brilliant extent that Churchill works it here. The opening restaurant scene bringing together women from across history is perhaps as instantly recognisable as Jimmy Porter’s ironing board, Edward Bond’s pram, or Sarah Kane’s Ian, head sticking sightlessly from the floorboards. It’s very famous and so, if the audience or the actors anticipate the accumulation of historical top girls, the effect is blunted.

I must say, it certainly seemed blunted last night in Max Stafford-Clark’s production which has come to the Trafalgar Studios from the Minerva. In fairness, it’s less Stafford-Clark’s fault than the Trafalgar’s, or perhaps it’s Stafford-Clark’s refusal to accept the conditions of the Trafalgar stage. The Minerva is a lovely, medium-scale thrust stage, audience on three sides, hugging the action,. The photo above is from the Minerva and shows that restaurant scene as cosy and intimate. Trafalgar Studio One is a wide, deep, tall stage and the auditorium is a barn; there are good democratic things about single raked seating units, but intimacy is not one of them. When you’re at the back of a single rake you really are at the back. The effect of galleries, boxes and circles is to cluster more nearly around the action, which is why Top Girls worked so well twice at the Royal Court and feels drafty here. (a) the restaurant table has been cranked open from its Minerva circle and becomes a cheated-out flat-front table with the diners on one side. It all becomes much more presentational. I’m not at all sure that this has been well thought through; certainly when the waitress takes the orders, she hopped irregularly between the diners. I’m sure the play is written such that people can talk logically to one another and yet the waitress can take orders in sequence. (b) the actors are having to shout to hit the 16th row. This coarsens the detailed naturalism of the writing, and these lines are just a beautifully fresh as ever, but not when shouted as if into a strong wind. (c) There’s wing space but no stage machinery and so the big scene changes that this production wanted necessitate two intervals. While we all schlepped to the bar, bales of hay were brought on and steps were reorganised. Later an open-plan office was stripped and a country kitchen installed as we supped. This stretched the evening to almost two-and-a-half hours and Top Girls is a play that thrives on the harshness of the juxtapositions. One effect of this was that in the actors often gabble their way through scenes: I imagined a first preview that topped the three-hour mark and the that this might have been the solution.

The composite effect of all this is that if you shout, cheat and gabble the scenes, they start looking like people are performing beloved comedy sketches rather than a play. I think of those French actors a few years ago who performed a cabaret of Monty Python sketches on the Edinburgh Fringe. The restaurant scene comes off worst from this treatment, the whole thing seeming like an absurdist skit rather than a historical counterpoint and prefiguring of the whole play. The acts basically got better as they went along; the office scenes, though sometimes knockabout fast, stood up strongly and the final confrontation between Marlene and Joyce in the latter’s kitchen was sharp and powerful (and incidentally did not feel in any sense dated). However, this turned the restaurant scene into a witty curtain-raiser to a basically realistic debate play about Thatcherism, which certainly blunts the strangeness and power of this play.

It comes down to Max Stafford-Clark’s persistent addiction to Bringing On Stuff. If we’d not needed a country kitchen; if we didn’t require real hay, we might have been able to go straight from act to act. The actors could have relaxed and, without all that paraphernalia, the focus might have been rightly on the actors and characters, not the Stuff. The hay, the sink, the in-trays don’t add much to the play in their physical presence. There were some rather well achieved digital projections (particularly good in the final act). More might be made of that.

Churchill’s plays, brilliant though they are, seem to me to have got increasingly restrictive and anally-retentive through the eighties. Plays like Top Girls and Serious Money are extraordinary but their formal concerns are so overdetermined as to make them performable only one way. Perhaps this is why of the four major London productions since 1982, 75% of them have been directed by Max Stafford-Clark. It’s hard to know what a director could do with Top Girls apart from do the play more or less well. That said, I’d love to see what Katie Mitchell could do with this play. The first scene calls out for her truthfulness and precision. (And finally no one could complain they couldn’t hear the actors because you’re not meant to). I have argued elsewhere that personally and politically, Churchill felt at the end of a certain road by the end of the eighties, which is why, suddenly, Mad Forest seemed so sprawling, so generous, so mysterious and why everything since has been politically more ambiguous and liable to so many more kinds of staging. Mad Forest to Seven Jewish Children, all of these plays seem written to cure directors of their addiction to Bringing On Stuff.