Some plays go through an awkward adolescence. Too young to be new, they are not old enough to be period. For a while, they can seem to be less about the playwright’s themes than about the trappings of their era.
Just over 40 years after its Royal Court debut, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls sometimes looks in this revival by Suba Das like a commentary on the decade that brought us shoulder pads, macramé owls and the Eurythmics. Dallas is showing on the spindly legged TV and a couple of the actors are so overstated they could be auditioning for parts. Even the theatre’s publicity promises the “music and fashion that transformed Britain” as if we were in for a night of retro fun.
These choices seem to miss the point but are not entirely off the mark. In a less superficial way, Churchill’s play is about the early 1980s. Written a few years into the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, it considers the then-novel phenomenon of women taking on managerial positions, often driven by the greed-is-good mantra of free-market ideology. For such a woman entering a man’s world, even the decision whether to wear dress or trousers is fraught.
Playing the newly promoted Marlene, Tala Gouveia does a great job blending the authority and insecurity of a woman single-minded enough to become general manager of a London recruitment company, but sensitive enough, beneath the surface confidence, to know the sacrifices she has made. “I’m not clever, I’m just pushy,” she tells her sister Joyce, an excellent, hardbitten Alicya Eyo who, in this staging, has stayed behind in the red-brick streets of Toxteth, her poverty not unrelated to Marlene’s wealth.
The fascination of the play is in its fragmented structure, its meanings expressed through the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated scenes. Its strength – and the reason it transcends its age – is in its knotty interrogation of women’s capacity to act independently. Even the formidable women of history who gather for the dream dinner party that opens the show have made their achievements in negotiation with male power. Elsewhere, the play is rich in detail about the everyday compromises that thwart ambition and narrow options, constraining lives today as much as they ever did.
At the Everyman theatre, Liverpool, until 25 March
