Top Girls - Softcover

Churchill, Caryl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0573630232 ISBN 13: 9780573630231

Publisher: Samuel French, Inc., 1984

Synopsis

Serious Comedy / Castin: 7f. with doubling / Ints.

Marlene has been promoted to managing director of a London employment agency and is celebrating. The symbolic luncheon is attended by women in legend or history who offer perspectives on maternity and ambition. In a time warp, these ladies are also her co workers, clients and relatives. Marlene, like her famous guests, has had to pay a price to ascend from proletarian roots to the executive suite: she has become, figuratively speaking, a male oppressor and even coaches female clients on adopting odious male traits. Marlene has also abandoned her illegitimate and dull witted daughter. Her emotional and sexual life has become as barren as Lady Macbeth's.

"A blistering yet sympathetic look at women who achieve success by adopting the worse traits of self made men.... Truly original." N.Y. Times.

"Very funny and provocative.... A mind lifting experience." N.Y. Post.

About this title

Review:

""Top Girls" has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert. You can smell life, and at the same time feel locked in an argument with an agile and passionate mind."--"The Sunday Times""A dramatist who must surely be rated among the half-dozen best now writing a playwright of genuine audacity and assurance, able to use her considerable wit and intelligence in ways at once unusual, resonant and dramatically riveting."--"New Statesman""One of our best writers her play is brilliantly conceived with considerable wit to illuminate the underlying deep human seriousness of her theme."--"Spectator"

About the Author:

Born in London, 1938, Churchill had some early acclaim with radio plays like The Ants (1962), not not not not not enough oxygen (1971) and Schreber's Nervous Illness (1972). However, it was through contact with feminism that she developed the language and structures to carry the complexity of her ideas. Top Girls (1982), perhaps Churchill's best play, keenly predicted the rise of bourgeois 'post-feminism' in the Thatcherite 1980s, raising stimulating questions, notably in its tour de force opening where the stories of six women from history overlap, clash and connect over a restaurant meal. Fen (1983) dissected economic and sexual oppressions in the Fenlands; the Foucault-inspired Softcops (1984) considered the meanings of criminality and punishment; and Serious Money (1987) was a witty verse thriller about the City, substantially attended by its objects of attack. Churchill's witty, powerfully intelligent dialogue and her uniquely imaginative sense of structure saw her at the forefront of British playwriting in the 1980s and 1990s.

About this edition

• Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0573630232
• ISBN 13: 9780573630231
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120