![]() The scope and budget of Turner’s production allows it to realise the epic ambition of Churchill’s play. Turner’s production asks, what duty of care does society – not just women – have to protect its most vulnerable members – those who don’t make the cut in the Darwinian struggle for resources? In a previous scene, Marlene dismissed Angie with shockingly off-hand cruelty: ‘She’s a bit thick. The final image of Turner’s production – Angie (Marlene’s daughter who she has she left to be brought up by her sister Joyce), in a nightdress, half-asleep, calling ‘Mum’ – is extremely powerful. The concluding word of the play, ‘Frightening’, anticipates the disorienting terror of the first scene of Churchill’s play Far Away (2000), written when neoliberalism had been well and truly inaugurated. Marlene’s optimism that ‘the eighties are going to be stupendous’ has accrued even more irony with hindsight. Yet, although Top Girls is now a period piece, it has lost none of its political bite. Lyndsey Turner’s production situates Top Girls precisely within its 1982 setting, conveyed through fabulous costumes designed by Merle Hensel and a programme essay by Dominic Sandbrook on the Margaret Thatcher years. ![]() RN: ‘By 2021, 50% of the work we stage by living writers will be written by women and 50% of all productions will be written by women.’ HH: ‘ Top Girls is an argument for compassion and a sharp look at social inequality, demanding a place at the table for women of all backgrounds.’ MB: ‘much as I love Churchill’s play, a big theatre and an epic cast do it few favours…at times it seems as if we’re watching three separate plays.’ĭB: ‘The question is whether or not something so time-specific can still speak to contemporary audiences.’ĪL: ‘The play was very explicitly written in the Thatcher era, but I don’t think these questions have dated.’ RN: ‘We are making substantial progress by staging more new work and revivals by women in all our theatres’ And what is the National, our primary theatrical debating chamber, serving up?’ĭavid Benedict: ‘No other playwright has so vividly dramatized the core feminist principle that the personal is political.’ĭC: ‘an absorbing but hardly exhilarating and on-the-button museum piece.’ RN: ‘women’s voices will dominate our stages for the first time in the National Theatre’s history’ĭominic Cavendish: ‘The country is experiencing the greatest political crisis in a generation – some even say since Suez. ![]() Michael Billington: ‘this is the best British play ever from a woman dramatist.’ Henry Hitchings: ‘What do women give up in order to be successful?’Īndrzej Lukowski: ‘This widescreen revival feels like vindication at last…It’s Top Girls, given the production it always deserved.’ ![]()
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