Book: Top Girls/ Author: Caryl Churchill/ Genre: Drama/Publisher: Methuen Publishing (July 1, 2003)/ ISBN-10: 0413554805

"What use is female emancipation if it transforms the clever woman into predators and does nothing for the weak and helpless? Does freedom and feminism consist of aggressively adopting the very values that have for centuries oppressed female sex?" Caryl Churchill asks readers and audience through her experimental and multi layered play Top Girls. Hailed as "The ten best British plays of the century" by Guardian critic Michael Billington, Top Girls, like Charolette Keatley's My Mother said I never Should, is an all female cast play exploring the superficial 'liberation' of women in the Thatcherite 1980's.

Churchill's use of innovative technique and her commitment to the socialist feminist politics brings into form a play that is at once difficult and daring. Churchill brings to her stage women not only from different nations but from different periods of time. In the first act of the three act play, we have five women characters from different eras invited by the central character Marlene, an epitome of a modern liberated woman, to celebrate her 'top job' promotion in an employment agency. These women provide 'a dramatic genealogy of Marlene's historical community'. There are three women from History who became famous by usurping male roles- Pope Joan, a nineteenth century Pope, Lady Ninjo, an emperor's concubine and later Buddhist nun and Isabella bird, a Victorian explorer; and the other two women- Dull Gret from Bruegel's sixteenth century painting; and Patient Griselda, an obedient wife, from the pages of Petrarch, Boccacio and Chaucer, who are the products of male imagination. These women share with each other and with the audience their "private and personal experiences" and question patriarchal structures either directly, like Joan and Isabella, or indirectly like Ninjo, or silently through victimization like Griselda and Gret.

The plot centers around Marlene, an over ambitious career oriented woman, who represents gender equality and women in workplace in contrast to home staying passive woman like her sister Joyce and the historical figures like dull Gret and patient Griselda. By contrasting the lifestyle of Marlene with the other women Churchill brings to question the success, if at all it is, women have had in a patriarchal society and the rate at which it is achieved.

Act I is a prologue to the next two acts which lay bare how and why Marlene succeeds the women of past and becomes a top girl. As Marlene's life opens up in the succeeding acts, we discover the cost at which Marlene becomes a top girl. Act III moves backward in time and Marlene's life opens up. we discover that Marlene not only sacrificed her motherhood for career but her own self. Marlene's daughter Angie was adopted by her sister Joyce, who following her miscarriage had to sacrifice her marriage for surrogate motherhood. Angie, is mentally challenged and so much wants to become like her aunt Marlene whom she idolizes. one could see Angie's friend kit all prepared to follow Marlene's footsteps. Kit says to Angie. "I'm not scared of anything" and " I'd find out where they are going to drop it [Nuclear Bomb] and stand right in place."

Marlene is shown to be abnormal in her determination to be at the top. It is ironivcally put in the words of conservative Mrs Kidd who thinks Marlene will end up lonely and miserable if she continues in her pursuit. When Mrs Kidd comes to plead for her husband who has been superseded by Marlene, Mrs Kidd says to Marlene: "What's it going to to him working for a woman? I think if it was a man he'd get over with it as something normal."

Creation of an all-female utopian world where women are passive recipients of male supremacy, super women adapting themselves to fit into the male world, weak women succumbing to the social and matriarchal needs, single mothers making way to acceptance, for all these features Top Girls, apparently seems like a feminist play asking for liberation from social traditions, marriage and sexual oppression. Churchill's socialist feminist agenda becomes clear in her own words. She once said about the play, "What I was intending to do was to make it first look as though it was celebrating the achievements of women. then- by showing the main character Marlene, being successful in a very competitive, destructive, Capitalist way- ask, what kind of achievement is that?"

The question the play puts to its audience is whether Marlene actually a "Top Girl". Is any woman, aiming for masculinity, freedom from her social, familial and matriarchal role, really a "Top Girl"?