English Literature Essay Subject: What is the purpose of Act 1 in Top Girls ? Top Girls is a play written by Caryl Churchill in 1988, which mixes fiction to reality, which is one reason why it was so popular at the time. Act 1 is a long spectacular dinner scene where several feminist themes are discussed. These themes echo throughout the play and as the play keeps changing perspectives, this first act is full of contradictions.
Act 1 has different functions which will all be approached in this essay, these include reflecting the view of women of the time and contrast it with other times, setting the mood and the atmosphere of the play, introducing the themes of the play and introducing the story and the characters. Act 1 of Top Girls opens in a restaurant where Marlene is hosting a dinner party for five friends on a Saturday night. She has recently been promoted at work. The five guests are all women that are either long dead or are fictional characters from literature or paintings.
They keep arriving but at the beginning there is only Isabella and Marlene. As the guests continue to arrive, the conversation starts the way it carries on. The women talk over each other and do not appear to be listening to each other’s stories, they keep interrupting each other and this is what makes the play hard to follow. This raises issues about a lack of solidarity and support amongst women and the repressed truth of each woman’s experience.
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The five guests of Marlene are: Isabella Bird a women that lived in the 19th century which travelled a lot, Lady Nijo who is a Japanese courtesan in the 13th century that became a Buddhist nun and travelled Japan, Dull Gret which a lady in a painting of Brueghel, Pope Joan a lady that supposedly disguised herself as a man to become pope in the 9th century and Patient Griselda who is the obedient wife whose story is told in the Canterbury Tales. In my opinion, the main purpose of Act 1 of Top Girls is to set the mood and the atmosphere of the play.
This is very frequent in theatre, we can say that this act can be considered as the “exposition scene” which introduces the main plot, the characters and the settings of the play. In this case, this act does all, it presents us with all of these details, the characters haven been discussed in the previous paragraph, the setting being London in the 1980s and the main theme is, of course, feminism. This act has also has a lot of humor, mutual congratulations and enjoyment however what started out to be a perfect dinner quickly becomes chaos.
The cheerful celebratory mood that marks the beginning of the scene gradually turns bitter, with each of the women exploring matters that were lost in their struggle to live on. By the end of the night most guests are drunk and Joan is actually being sick. We can therefore see that the mood of the play will differ from time to time just like in this act. Furthermore in act 1, we can really see the different views of society on women. This is why act 1 is so particular, it really brings out all of the similarities and differences of women’s functions throughout time: it establishes the role of women.
The different personal stories of the characters all agree that despite the different times and backgrounds (social), lead to the universal female experience of oppression. Marlene, who reflects women in England during the 1980s, represents half of the women of the time, the other half being represented by Joyce and Angie (Marlene representing the emerging type of women, that is to say the hard working , determined and ambitious kind, and Joyce and Angie representing the low working class (refer to act 2)).
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One of the reasons for this “new type” of women is that the 1980s was a time when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of England. She stated that “There is no such thing as society. There are only men and women and there are families. ” This is one of the main ideas of Marlene, she comes out as a new generation of women that can do the same jobs as men, can do the same activities as men … This is contrasted by the lapidation of Pope Joan, who was thought to be a men and gave birth to a child, because a pope could not be a women.
The act of death shows us the cruelty of Joan’s reality. Finally, this first part of Top Girls introduces many of the themes of the play; one theme being the “new women” discussed in the previous paragraph with the “Thatcherism of English society”. There is also the theme of lovers and marriage, which is described in a very negative way. They mostly agree on the fact that a solitary life is liberation, and that getting married ruins your chance of living a good life: “There was noting in my life”.
This quote really comes back to “Thatcherism” and how women were more and more independent. There are many more themes discussed in this act that will be developed throughout the rest of the play, for example oppression, feminism … In conclusion the first act of Top Girls is very important for the understanding of the play, it gives indications to the reader on what to expect in the play and the messages that Caryl Churchill intends on passing through Top Girls.
