TOP GIRLS. To 28 February.

Glasgow

TOP GIRLS
by Caryl Churchill

Citizens' Theatre To 28 February 2004
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 25min Two intervals

TICKETS: 0141 429 0022
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 February

Even after all these years, the attempt to transplant affluent London to Glasgow, and poor rural East Anglia to Fife, doesn't ring true. Caryl Churchill caught the mood, and came to seem prophetic, in her 1982 play. But it was an English mood. The country which was about to drain every constituency of Conservative MPs doesn't provide the infrastructure for this dramatic import.

An uneven production doesn't help it's as if we can no longer imagine the full flow of virgin Thatcherism, when career-woman Marlene (predicting a stupendous' 1980s) takes over Top Girls' women's employment agency, beating the man who, old-world style, had expected promotion, and midway through having to fend off his loyal, aggrieved wife.

Ever-experimental, Churchill suits technique to the moment. Her structure a central act with fragments of business and personal life surrounded by two sustained acts of business and family respectively opens with the play's most famous scene. Marlene's celebration guests gather from several continents and centuries, women whose courage made changes. They've a lot to talk about, and as their speech overlap the production points up detail: Victorian explorer Isabella Bird emerges as lead interrupter, bringing everything round to her experiences, Marlene smiles with polite disengagement at Japanese courtesan Lady Nijo's comments. But the staging, a row at a long restaurant table, restricts conversational interplay.

If Cait Davis scores as Dull Gret, she's hardly believable as the teen daughter Marlene left behind. The scenes of Marlene's return to uprooted roots are the least successful, though Robin Don's thematic set three huge profits graphs - for once stops being a mere intellectual response when the largest splits open for Angie's route to bed. Yet, this is family disrupting business, while Daniele Nardini's competent but undriven Marlene has made the opposite journey. Inconsistent, or satisfyingly ironic?

Best are the office scenes. Director Hettie Macdonald distinguishes between the cold glamour of Caroline Devlin's Nell and the concerned professionalism of Pauline Turner's Win. Her interview with Lindy Whiteford's Louise, seeking an out from her job after years of being taken for granted, has an illuminating precision missing from the family scenes. Despite strong work from Patricia Kerrigan's left-leaning, left-behind-by-the times sister, the argument, embodying the play's crucial lifestyle profit-and-loss account, remains unfocused.

Marlene: Daniele Nardini
Waitress/Kit/Shona: Sally Reid
Isabella Bird/Joyce/Mrs Kidd: Patricia Kerrigan
Lady Nijo/Win: Pauline Turner
Dull Gret/Angie: Cait Davis
Pope Joan/Louise: Lindy Whiteford
Patient Griselda/Nell/Jeanine: Caroline Devlin

Director: Hettie Macdonald
Designer: Robin Don
Lighting: Gerry Jenkinson
Assistant director: Jennifer Reader

2004-02-23 09:39:02