 Hello and welcome to our video summarizing all you need to know about top girls, a play by Carille Churchill. My name is Sarah and in this video we look at the play specifically beginning with a plot summary. We'll then examine the necessary information you need to know before looking at each character in depth, key themes as well as important symbols. This video is very useful especially if you are studying top girls as part of your English coursework or exam as we will get into the details you need to know to get top marks. So let's get started. Top girls is a 1982 play by Carille Churchill. It centers around Marlene, a career driven woman who is heavily invested in women's success in business. The play examines the roles available to women in modern society and what it means or takes for a woman to succeed. It also dwells heavily on the cost of ambition and the influence of thaturates politics on feminism. Act one of top girls takes place in a high plundern restaurant where Marlene is gathering five other women to celebrate her promotion to managing director of top girls, the employment agency where she works. The scene is surreal because Marlene's five dinner guests are female figures from different historical eras. Isabella Byrd, a 19th century writer and traveler, Lady Naijo, a 13th century courtesan, and later Buddhist nun, Dool Greed, the subject of a wriggle painting who led an army of women into hell to fight the devils. Top Joanne, a 9th century woman who disguised herself as a man and became pope. A patient grizzled up the obedient wife from the clerk's tale in Chaucer's The Caterbury Tales. These women are bound together by their struggles against patriarchy and oppression and Marlene relates to each of them differently. Act two is set at the top girls employment agency. Marlene is interviewing a woman named Janine who wants a new job because there are no prospects for advancement at her current position. Through her questions, Marlene reveals that she looks down on Janine for her desire to get married young, have children, and her uncertainty about her professional future. Janine only offers Janine two openings, one at a company that makes knitwear and the other lampshades, neither of which fulfill Janine's request for opportunities and travel. Regardless, Marlene tells Janine to be confident and present herself well because her performance reflects on Marlene and the agency. Act two, scene two is set in Joyce's backyard where two young girls, Angie and Kit, have built a shelter out of junk. They tease and challenge each other and make a plan to see an x-rated film in town. Angie speaks in a blunt and monosyllabic manner and vocalizes her desire to kill her own mother. Angie also reveals secret plans to visit her aunt in London. Later, Joyce makes Angie clean her room before she can go to the movies. Angie returns wearing an old, best dress that is slightly small for her. It begins to rain and Joyce and Kit run inside while Angie stays put. Kit comes out of the house and shouts at Angie to come inside, then goes down to Angie. Angie tells Kit, I put on this dress to kill my mother. Act two, scene three is set in the top girl's employment agency on a Monday morning. Win and Nell have just arrived to begin work. They are drinking coffee and chatting about the men they dated or had affairs with over the weekend. Marlene arrives and Nell and Win upload and whistle for her after being promoted over her work, but Nell also indicates that she envies Marlene's success. Later, Win interviews Louise, who is 46, and feels that it's time to move on from her long-term job. Louise is frustrated at her lack of a personal life due to her sustained commitment to the job, and has watched as younger men are consistently being promoted to better positions while she's never considered. Win tells Louise the reality of the situation, that some companies may value her experience, but they are more likely to hire younger men. After the break, the setting reverts to the main office atop girls, Angie comes to see Marlene, who does not recognize her niece at first. Angie reveals that she has come to London on a one-way ticket without telling Joyce and will be needing a place to stay. Angie idolizes Marlene and starts asking questions about her job. While Angie is in Marlene's office, Mrs. Kidd enters. She is the wife of Howard Kidd who lost the promotion to Marlene. Mrs. Kidd tells Marlene that the news has left Howard a nervous wreck and requests Marlene to give up the promotion, since Howard is a man and he has a family to support. Marlene brushes off Mrs. Kidd and her absurd request, and in response Mrs. Kidd calls Marlene one of those bull breakers and tells her she'll end up miserable and lonely. After the break, Nell is interviewing Shona, who claims to be 29 and working at her current sales job for four years. Nell, impressed, suggests that Shona might be a good employee for the top girls employment agency. Nell then presses Shona a bit on her current job and personal life, collecting details to present to potential employers. Shona delivers a far-fetched story about driving a company Porsche and staying in hotels on the company's expense account. Nell realizes that Shona is lying and calls the interview a waste of time. Shona finally admits that she is only 21 and has no experience. After a scene break, Nell enters the main office to find Angie seated at her desk. She introduces herself and praises Angie's aunt Marlene. They start talking and Nell tells Angie about her professional trajectory. She often mentions getting married but indicates that her husband has been imprisoned. However, Angie falls asleep during Nell's story. Moments later, Nell comes into the office and tells Nell that Howard's kid has had a heart attack. Marlene comes into the office and sees Angie asleep. Wynne tells Marlene that Angie aspires to work at top girls and Marlene says bluntly, pack her in Tesco more like. Wynne says she thinks Angie is a nice kid but Marlene says she is a bit thick, a bit funny and that she is not going to make it. Act 3 is a flashback scene set at Joyce's home on a Sunday evening, three years earlier. The last time Marlene visited Joyce and Angie in Ip Ip Switch. One of the gifts Marlene has brought is the dress that Angie wears in Act 1. Joyce grumbles that Marlene's surprise visit has caught her off guard and we learn that Angie has orchestrated the visit and invited Marlene without telling Joyce. In this scene, we learn more about Joyce and Marlene's past as the sisters begin sharing a bottle of whiskey. At one point, Angie asks her aunts to tuck her in and Marlene does. When the sisters are alone, Joyce scolds Marlene for leaving town when she was younger and leaving Joyce to look after their mother and Angie, who is actually Marlene's biological child. The sisters continue to argue and it comes out that Marlene got pregnant with Angie at age 17 but didn't tell anyone about it until it was too late for an abortion. Joyce and her husband Frank offered to take the child after being married for three years and having no children of their own. However, Joyce blames the stress of raising Angie for her subsequent miscarriage. Marlene and Joyce begin to argue about British politics with Marlene taking the pro-thatcher conservative side and Joyce siding with the socialist left wing. The two change the subject and begin talking about their parents' working class struggles and difficult marriage. Marlene tells Joyce that she doesn't believe in class, anyone ought to be able to pursue their desires if they have what it takes. Marlene does not feel that she should be expected to help stupid or lazy or frightened people find jobs. Joyce thinks that Angie falls into the stupid, lazy and frightened category but Marlene brushes off her concerns. Joyce meanwhile expects Angie to have a wasted life so long as England is run by them, meaning thatcher's conservative party. Joyce accuses Marlene of being one of them. Joyce tries to tell her sister to relax and says she did not mean everything she said. Joyce does not accept the gesture and holds on to her claims. She does not want to be friends with her sister, it is clear that their opposite life choices have given a wedge between them. Joyce goes to bed. Alone Marlene sits wrapped in a blanket and pours herself another drink. Angie comes into the room and calls out, Mum, Marlene says, Angie. What's the matter? And again Angie calls out Mum, Marlene replies, not she's gone to bed, it's Auntie Marlene. Angie then says frightening and when Marlene asks if she had a bad dream and suggests things are fine now because she's awake, Angie again says frightening and the play ends. On to character analysis. Marlene, the central protagonist of Top Girls who has just been promoted to managing director at the employment agency where she works. Marlene's career ambitions have led her to abandon her family, including her daughter Angie, who was instead raised by Marlene's sister Joyce, Isabella Byrd, an English woman who lived from 1831 to 1904. She was an avid explorer and traveled all around the world between the age of 40 and 70. She wrote extensively about her experiences abroad. Byrd married late in life because of her professional aspirations, but her husband died short of their five-year anniversary. She was one of Marlene's dinner guests in Act 1. Janine, a 20-year-old woman who Marlene interviews at Top Girls. Janine wants to save money for a wedding and eventually have children. Marlene takes this to mean that Janine lacks her career ambitions and therefore Marlene treats her as an inferior. Joyce, Angie's adoptive mother and Marlene's sister. Joyce and Marlene do not get along well. Joyce raised Angie because Marlene wanted to escape Ipswich and pursue a career. Joyce represents the perspective of the working class. However, she is not a particularly sympathetic character and is very resentful of her sister. Angie, Marlene's 16-year-old biological daughter who was adopted by Marlene's sister Joyce. She is aggressive and unintelligent and spends most of her time with her younger neighbor, Kit. Angie makes an unexpected visit to London to see Marlene because she aspires to be like her. Louise, a 46-year-old woman interviewing at Top Girls, she wants a new job after 21 years at a firm that does not truly value her experience, but Wynn feels that her age will make it difficult to find her a new position. Mrs. Kit, the wife of Howard Kit, Marlene's co-worker. Mrs. Kit visits Marlene at the Top Girls office to request Marlene to give up her promotion since Howard has worked at the firm longer and has a family to look after. Shona, a young girl who interviews with Nell. Nell is impressed with her until she discovers that Shona has falsified her background and actually has no experience at all. On to theme analysis. Women and careers. The relationship between women and work is essential to Top Girls from its opening act. The surrealist dinner party in Act 1 is a celebration of Marlene's promotion over her male colleague Howard Kit. As the play develops, we learn that Marlene has achieved professional success at the cost of a meaningful personal life. Meanwhile, all the women who attend Marlene's dinner party have transcended gender roles during their lives and have occupied positions generally associated with men. Joan, whose Pope great led an army, now violently retaliated against her lord, the emperor, and Isabella spent her life exploring and writing books about her travels. Churchill critically examines the context of economic independence for women during the 70s, written through Marlene and the other women who she encounters at the Top Girls Employment Agency. Joyce is an antithesis to Marlene as she got married and became a stay-at-home mom. In Act 3, however, it becomes clear that neither Marlene nor Joyce is completely fulfilled, leading the audience to ponder the ways in which women can strike a balance between work and life. Language and identity. Language connects deeply to personal and collective identity in Top Girls. In Act 1, Churchill explores this relationship through an experimental and surrealist technique interwaving the different characters' stories in a kaleidoscopic way. Each woman speaks in the language of her particular historical era, but their speeches overlap, emphasizing their common experiences, resisting patriarchy across generations. Churchill also uses language as an indicator of class status and social differentiation. Her depiction of the 70s Britain. The female characters who work at Top Girls, Neil, Win and Marlene, speak in a casual, slung-heavy manner that places them inside an elite and competitive circle of professional women. Meanwhile, Joyce and Angie use caustic, curse-laden language that marks them as working class individuals. Angie's simple vocabulary, however, also carries an emotional intensity and directness that recalls Dull Gretz's speech in Act 1. Carriel Churchill has publicly acknowledged that Margaret Thatcher's rise to the position of British Prime Minister was an important inspiration for writing Top Girls. Churchill is deeply interested in feminism and the ongoing consequences of the women's liberation movement. There was a certain irony in Margaret Thatcher's assent to power in the wake of feminism, since Thatcher's policies were deeply conservative and anti-feminist. The feminist movement in Britain has been typically connected to left-wing political positions, especially socialism. In Top Girls, Churchill draws upon this contradiction in her depiction of Marlene, a woman who is extremely successful in the professional world but whose victories on this front appear to come at the cost of ignoring her personal life. Churchill clearly depicts the conflicting views of Thatcher in the conversation between Joyce and Marlene. Marlene is proud that Thatcher, a woman, has become such a powerful elected official while Joyce does not consider Thatcher's gender in her assessment that the Prime Minister's policy is suffocating the working class. Top Girls depicts political economic conditions of oppression in 70s Britain. Many working class families like Joyce and Angie experienced nothing but difficulty and saw no opportunities for advancement. Joyce and Marlene's blue color upbringing was marked by parental conflict and constant disappointment due to their father's limited opportunities for work. This led him to beat Marlene and Joyce's mother, who was effectively trapped in a situation of domestic abuse. However, the play also suggests that there may be opportunities to resist structures of oppression that stem from conventions surrounding class and gender. For instance, the Dinner Party in Act 1 allows Churchill to draw surprising connections between women from vastly different classes and historical eras through their common resistance to patriarchal oppression. Also, the sexes of the women at the Top Girls Agency shows a form of empowerment although it is qualified by the fact that the women use their intelligence to further their individual situations rather than to critically engage the patriarchy that undergards their professional environment. So that's it for this video. If you found it useful, give it a thumbs up and do subscribe to our channel where we offer free materials that you can use as part of your studies. To really get a better grasp of specific areas you might find challenging. Make sure to visit our website as well where you'll find useful revision guides, modal answers and tools to get top marks. Thank you for listening.