Top Girls Misses the Mark
Classic Caryl Churchill play opens at the Vancouver Playhouse
May 17, 2009
Top Girls centres around Marlene, who has just been promoted to Managing Director of the 'Top Girls Employment Agency'. The play begins in a restaurant, as Marlene, in honour of her promotion, throws a dinner party at a local restaurant and invites important women from history to dine with her. There is Isabella Bird, who was an English traveler and writer, Lady Nijo, who was a 13th century Japanese Buddhist nun, Dull Gret, a women known in folklore, Pope Joan, a 9th century Pop who hid her gender from the masses, and Patient Griselda, who is a character from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
The first forty five minutes is filled with overlapping dialogue and is more reminiscent of an episode of The View than an interesting piece of theatre. The story begins to flush out a little in subsequent scenes, as we discover Marlene's dark secret that she has kept quiet on her rise to the "top".
This is a complicated piece of theatre, to say the least, and unfortunately, this production is riddled with problems from scene 1. The overlapping dialogue is impossible to follow, and key points and statements are lost with the five women essentially "one upping" each other throughout. Throw in a distracting and upstaging performance from Meg Roe as Gret, and the entire opening scene feels like it takes hours rather than forty minutes. It's a confusing mess, and that's where the problems begin - not end.
What we discover over the subsequent two hours is that Marlene had a child at a young age, and left her in the care of her older sister, Joyce. Angie (Marlene's daughter) thinks that Joyce is her mother, and runs away from home to her Aunt Marlene in London. When Marlene returns Angie to Joyce, the sparks are suppose to fly, but they don't.
It's easy to sort out what Churchill was (and is) trying to say, but this production leaves it up to the audience to put the pieces together rather than having a clear, concise piece of theatre laid out before us. In most cases, one would applaud the playwright for giving the audience a chance to do just that, but not with a play like Top Girls.
Most of the blame has to be placed on Glynis Leyshon, who stepped down as the Artistic Managing Director of the Vancouver Playhouse last season, only to return to the theatre with a loud thud. A piece like Top Girls needs a skillful hand for so many reasons - case in point, the opening scene. Leyshon has allowed her actors to simply sleep walk through the dialogue, leaving the audience confused and bewildered. There should be an emotional climax to the piece, at the end of the play when Joyce confronts Marlene about the choices she has made. There isn't. The end of the show goes out with a whimper, rather than a wallop.
The performances are, sadly, mediocre. One would expect a little more from such seasoned theatre veterans as Jillian Fargey, Meg Roe and Jennifer Clement, but they have been asked to accomplish a monumental task with a play such as this, and have been essentially left to their own devices and are let down by their director.
Twenty seven years after its premiere, Top Girls seems to be showing its wrinkles and .cracks, and that this play and production should have been so much more than it actually is.
Top Girlsby Caryl Churchill runs at the Vancouver Playhouse until May 30, 2009
** (out of five)
