Having it all? Still stranger than fiction - Women's Agenda

Having it all? Still stranger than fiction

For a play written in response to the rise of Margaret Thatcher, it’s remarkable that the career and motherhood themes in Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls are as relevant today as they were back when the script was written in 1982, according to director Jenny Kemp.

Top Girls, which opened Thursday night at Melbourne’s MTC Theatre, is based largely on the experiences of Marlene (played by Anita Hegh) who is promoted to the top job at an all-male employment agency. She’s gotten there by avoiding marriage, children and the work/life balancing act, raising questions on whether it’s all been worth it.

Director Jenny Kemp tells Women’s Agenda the play’s key themes show little has changed for women balancing career and motherhood. “A lot of the issues or the way that women’s choices were narrow and they were trapped within particular situations, you can still see in various forms reflected in our society today,” she says
“It still seems to be the case that for a woman to be in a high power job, there’s still very little flexibility within the workplace to enable a satisfaction situation for raising children.”

 

The play crosses a number of different time periods, but it’s base in the 1980’s depicts a time when women were moving into jobs typically held by men, when conflicts between career and motherhood were coming to fruition and once commonly held feminist beliefs were challenged. “What Churchill exposes really, is that what tended to happen in the climb up that career ladder is that women started to appropriate the system feminism had been critiquing,” says Kemp.

Kemp refers to Marie-Anne Slaughter’s recent piece in The Monthly asking if women can really have it all — in which the author describes the conflicts she felt between raising teenage boys and working in a high-powered government job — to describe why some of Churchill’s ideas are still relevant. “That [article] was interesting, especially because of the comparison with the job [Slaughter] she had, and then the one she took with the university in which she had some flexibility.”

But it’s not just feminist themes, but issues around class that Kemp believes the audience may find even more pertinent today. “There’s a lot that goes beyond those core feminist ideas. There’s also family dynamics, the class divide, there’s religion. And of course there is the relationship between work and motherhood.”

It’s a challenging play for the audience, adds Kemp, but one she hopes will see her all female cast able to entertain while asking the question, what’s changed?

Top Girls is playing at MTC’s Southbank Theatre, The Sumner until 29 September.

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