Since reading (and later seeing) Romeo and Juliet in high school, I have loved plays. The structure and organization of plays draw me in because it leaves so much to the imagination. Playwrights don’t spend a great deal of time “setting the scene,” which I enjoy as a reader because it allows me to fully imagine the setting, background, and scenes.

I acquired Top Girls when one of my favorite professors, Dr. Wendy Furman-Adams, was cleaning out her office a few months before her retirement. She had set up hundreds of books outside of Brotman Hall (a building on Whittier College’s campus that houses the humanities) and let students take whatever books they wanted.

One of my absolute favorite things to do is blind-buy books, aka “judge books by their covers,” and I am so glad I chose this play.

Top Girls brilliantly captures continuous conversations that stem across historical time periods that all investigate the experience of women trying to make it. To explain this adequately, I turn to the text…

Act one opens at a restaurant with Marlene and Isabella confirming their table of six. As Marlene and Isabella briefly chat, other dinner party members start to arrive, including Nijo, Gret, and Pope Joan. As the five women chat, the final guest, Griselda, arrives, and Marlene introduces her to the group:

MARLENE. Now who do you know? This is Joan who was Pope in the ninth century, and Isabella Bird, the Victorian traveller and Lady Nijo from Japan, Emperor’s concubine and Buddhist nun, thirteenth century, nearer your own time, and Gret who was painted by Brueghel. Griselda’s in Boccaccio and Petrarch and Chaucer because of her extraordinary marriage.

Beyond where (and when) the women come from, they all meet at this restaurant to celebrate Marlene, who has recently become the managing director at an employment agency.

What I enjoy most from act one is Churchill’s ability to accurately describe the experience of having dinner with five women. The most effective way she does this is by using interruptions in the character’s speeches. I’m sure most women would agree with me that when you’re hanging out with a group of women, there are sometimes three or four conversations happening at once that involve both everyone yet only some people at given moments. Churchill captures this experience remarkably throughout the entire play.

Despite the women coming from different regions and periods, Churchill writes the women’s voices in a very modern way. The way the women discuss and describe their experiences is hilarious. For example, as Joan describes her experience of being a female pope, she cracks a joke about the Plagues of Egypt occurring:

JOAN. Yes, I enjoyed being Pope. I consecrated bishops and let people kiss my feet. I received the King of England when he came to submit to the church. Unfortunately, there were earthquakes, and some village reported it had rained blood, and in France, there was a plague of giant grasshoppers, but I don't think that can have been my fault, do you?

However, Churchill also shows a different side of the women during the discussion of Nijo’s experience as the Emperor’s concubine and later a Buddhist nun.

Unfortunately, I have to say the ending of this play let me down. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I did in some ways want the women from act one to return at the end. I felt let down that the early women only appeared once and never were brought up or mentioned again.

Despite this, I did enjoy the connections between acts two and three. The dichotomy between Marlene and Joyce is fantastic. The way in which the author uses their relationship and their origins from the same mother but completely different perspectives on life is fascinating. I also thought it was really clever to end the play with a flashback. However, it does leave the play a bit unclear, in my opinion.

Suppose you were unfamiliar with the different historical times that the author refers to. In that case, some of what’s going on in the play and some hidden messages may not be very obvious. For example, I’m not very familiar with the Thatcher era, but that plays a significant role in this book. Regardless, I think it was enjoyable to read the book without any previous knowledge because the larger message of the play—how gender complicates social class—is undeniable. For these reasons, I would recommend this book to those who have some experience with reading plays and those interested in women’s writing that comments on the female experience.

Thank you for reading,