Caryl Churchill - Top Girls

A detailed Summary of Caryl Churchill - Top Girls

Caryl Churchill, a dramatic playwright composes plays that always have a power and gender political essence to them; mainly reflecting women in society. Her plays are provocative and challenging, in particular her play Top Girls, which prompts political thinking and sets up a debate within the theatre. In contrast to this play, the film If, directed by Lindsay Anderson, takes place in a male boarding school and incorporates many disconcerting elements, standing out from mainstream cinema.

In order to decipher as to whether power, freedom and personal fulfilment are demonstrated in different ways in both examples, I believe we first need to address the author and director of Top Girls and If respectively. The obvious distinction is their personal gender and not just specifically the gender of the characters they each utilise; a notion I believe will have an affect on how these themes are presented to us.

Caryl Churchill is a playwright of ideas with her primary concern being the individual's struggle to emerge from the ensnarements of culture, class, economic systems, and the imperatives of the past. Not surprisingly for a contemporary female writer, she primarily employs female characters to deal with such themes. Feminist the

In Top Girls Churchill seems to intend to portray the roles of women and what they face: the social taboos they fought against, the lives they had to choose between, the loss of all feminine identity to succeed and the loss of family life because of that choice. In order for women to possess power in today's society they have to assume a male role; the main rule being to put their career first and family second, just like a man. However, this does pose a social problem as the morally correct thing to do is for the women to take care of the children. In Top Girls we see this behaviour mainly exemplified by Marlene in her self denial of a family while pursuing a professional career. She gives her child away to another woman, she leads a very unstable life dealing with different lovers and her life somewhat resembles that of a male bachelor businessmen. Hence, it appears that Marlene feels she has to assume this role in order to succeed in society which therefore results in a power gain.

The representation of the opposite genders in both examples is also very interesting. In Top Girls, men are considered to be the root of the women's problems and social downfall. However, in If, the female is a product of dreams and fantasies and almost like an embodiment instead of an actual character with a personality. In the main scene that 'the girl' materialises in she at first appears to have joint status with Travis with the joint seduction of each other and the power rests equally between them, both physically and sexually. However, as the film develops, she then reappears as Travis' handmaid and has not gained a separate identity after all. This definitely shows a gap in gender politics and demonstrates that the male has been able to gain sexual liberation and although the girl expresses sexual power she has no separate identity of her own. This clearly reveals to me the status of women in society at that time.

It demonstrates to us that in contrast to Top Girls, males also suffer hierarchical problems within their own different gender groups.This is obviously a major contrast but still shows that gender does affect how power and freedom are represented, but in very different ways. Churchill wants to illustrate women's power up against men and how they can be let free in the male world but Anderson is specifically representing his own gender in a distinct way.

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Approximate Word count = 1768
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

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