Top Girls: Acting Edition S.

Chronology (Churchill's life and work, alongside significant political, social and cultural events)

Contexts

* Historical contexts (women's rights/advancement; Thatcher's Britain)
* Theatrical contexts (The Royal Court; Max Stafford Clark; production history; critical responses)
* The play today (an interview with David Shirley, director of the play in 2014)

Themes

* Women and work
* Female Genealogy: Mothers and daughters (killing your mother; giving up your daughter); sisters (and sisterhood); 'Herstory'/re-finding women's histories
* Women's ability/freedom to occupy multiple/conflicting roles
* Women aping masculine behaviour/dress/passing as men
* 'Getting away'/freedom/travel/social mobility
* Class (individualism vs socialism; economic/social mobility; materialism vs human compassion; 'successful' women ignoring the plight of less fortunate women)

Dramatic Technique

* Language
* Structure
* Characterisation/multi-roling

Academic Debate (including suggestions for further reading)

Related Work

Play Text (with on-page glossing/notes)

Glossary of Dramatic Terms

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
Ms Churchill is one of our best writers.her play is brilliantly conceived with considerable wit to illuminate the underlying deep human seriousness of her theme
A playwright of genuine audacity and assurance, able to use her considerable wit and intelligence in ways at once unusual, resonant and dramatically riveting
The work build to a superb emotion-draining climax that sent me out of the theatre convinced that this is the best British play ever from a woman dramatist

Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. Her acclaimed body of work also includes Three More Sleepless Nights (1980); Top Girls (1982); Fen (1983); Mouthful of Birds (1986); Serious Money (1989); The Skriker (1984); Blue/Heart (1998) and Far Away in Autumn (2000) which transferred to the West End.