Top Girls at Liverpool Everyman
Kristy Stott, Theatre Editor
Liverpool Everyman Creative Director Suba Das leads a female identifying and non-binary team of performers and creatives in a staging of a 40th-anniversary production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls.
The performance run also neatly coincides with International Women’s Day 2023.
Transporting audiences back to the 1980s, Top Girls places women and their stories centre stage. Set in a divisive political era of strikes and uprisings, as well as a transformative time for music and fashion, the play centres around Marlene, a career-driven woman who is at the top of her game. The play opens with the glitz and glamour of London life as Marlene hosts a fantastical dinner party to celebrate her recent promotion as the new Managing Director of Top Girls Employment Agency. Surreal and dreamlike, her dinner party guests are a series of women from history, both real and fictional.
In a wonderful reworking of her original script, Churchill has shifted the action to Liverpool.
The rest of the play takes a more naturalistic approach when Marlene (Tala Gouveia) returns home to Toxteth, Liverpool and faces a showdown with her sister Joyce (Alicya Eyo), who lays down some hidden truths. In a wonderful reworking of her original script, Churchill has shifted the action to Liverpool, from the play’s original setting of Suffolk, and has reframed sisters – Marlene and Joyce – as working-class Black Liverpudlian women.
Acknowledged as one of British theatre’s crowning glories, Top Girls has always offered a lively commentary on the interplay between feminism and ambition – now, the groundbreaking and urgent play digs even deeper to examine the true price of success for a woman of colour achieving in a man’s world.
The show will be complemented with a series of supporting discussions, workshops and accessible performances.
In addition to marking four decades of Churchill’s acclaimed play, the performance run at Liverpool Everyman also neatly coincides with International Women’s Day 2023. In a double celebration of both milestones, the show will be complemented with a series of supporting discussions, workshops and accessible performances.
