Rising to the top

Caryl Churchill’s best-known play, Top Girls, owes a large debt to 1970s TV comedy. It opens with a Pythonesque dinner party in which noted female figures from myth and history get drunk while swapping gags and stories. We meet a Victorian explorer, an emperor’s concubine, a 16th-century Flemish battle-axe and a long-suffering Italian peasant girl. The scene has no internal logic or dramatic direction and, just like a Python routine, it’s besotted with its own inventiveness and it relies on erudite banter and verbal shocks to sustain our interest. The central figure, Pope Joan, is thought to have served as pontiff in the 9th century, and she delivers a tragi-comic account of a papal ceremony during which she gave birth to a child and was stoned to death by an outraged mob. The sketch ends with her puking over the floorboards.

Next, the action shifts to an unconnected scene — a jump-cut technique also used by Python — in which two young girls bicker competitively about sex. Their amusingly frank exchanges might have been cribbed from The Liver Birds, a flatshare comedy by Carla Lane about two sexually liberated girls. Another jump-cut takes us to a busy recruitment office in London run by a glamorous all-powerful sex-goddess, Marlene, who makes men quake with terror. When she wins promotion over a male colleague, he has a nervous breakdown and sends his wife to the office to beg Marlene to step down in his favour. ‘Piss off,’ she retorts in her cut-glass accent. Marlene is clearly a facsimile of Margo Leadbetter, a role played by Penelope Keith in the BBC sitcom The Good Life which ran from 1975 to 1978. In the final scene, Marlene’s chic cosmopolitan life is contrasted, rather schematically, with the drudgery of her sister who toils as a cleaner while raising a narky and ungrateful teenage girl.