6 January 2023

 

 

 

“I’m realising what a genius Caryl Churchill is!”

Suba Das, creative director at the Everyman and Playhouse, spoke to Damon Fairclough about Top Girls.

Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, first performed in 1982, is acknowledged as a classic of British theatre. When did you first come across it?

I first encountered Top Girls in a student production at university, and I found it quite strange – I didn’t really get a handle on it at the time.

Then I was invited to the opening night of the 30th anniversary production, ten years ago. I loved the 1980s style of it all, and I began to get a real sense that Marlene, the lead character, is a tough woman who’s out to climb the career ladder.

And then you get to the second half, with this scene in which Marlene has returned to her family home – where she comes from – and you start to realise how these pieces that you've been shown fit together.

As somebody who was brought up on benefits in the North East to an immigrant family, and who got myself to Cambridge, that feeling of what it is to go back to a family home and to feel that your lives are totally different really resonated with me. You know that you've moved across class in a way that your family hasn't.

Seeing all this unfold in Top Girls was very powerful.

What prompted you to choose it for this Everyman production?

Having had the opportunity to encounter Top Girls more fully in the years since then, I’ve realised it's a play that asks a question of us all: if we act as individuals and pursue the things that capitalism tells us will make us successful, what does that mean for the world? What does it mean for the idea of society and community?

Have we ever lived through a time that requires us to ask those questions more? 

When I was offered the opportunity of running the Everyman, what else would I do other than want a play that's asking those questions? And to direct it in Liverpool, which is an activist city – a bold, bolshy, political city that believes in holding power to account? This play is fundamentally that.

Then it turned out that my first day here as creative director was the first day of rehearsals for Corrina, Corrina by Chloë Moss, who shares an agent, Mel Kenyon, with Caryl Churchill. 

So we just asked Mel, “Has anyone snapped up the rights to Top Girls at the moment?”. And she came back and said, “Caryl would love you to do it!”.

Which was terrifying!

I believe Caryl’s even reworking elements of the play for this production?

I felt deeply aware of being a man taking on Top Girls, because we know that women in theatre don't necessarily have access to the same range of opportunities as men. So Caryl's blessing has been important, and it’s a privilege to now be working quite closely with her – and yes, she’s reworking the play slightly for us for its 40th anniversary.

In the original script, Marlene and Joyce grow up somewhere in Suffolk, and then Marlene makes it to the big bad city. But in our production, Marlene and Joyce will be working-class women from Liverpool in the early 1980s – and because we’re moving the play from Suffolk to Liverpool, Caryl has granted us permission to create the first ever major production of Top Girls that will be led by two women of colour. So we’ll have a black British Marlene and Joyce.

That means we can look at what it means for Marlene to be a black woman who ‘makes it’ in a corporate office, with all the shoulder pads and hairspray, as the only woman of colour in that world.

Suddenly, all of that has become possible through this production, and what is such a joy is Caryl's excitement for that.

There’s a serious heart to Top Girls, but it’s fun too isn’t it?

Oh yes, it’s hilarious! There's such a huge amount of fun. Part of the challenge for me is that I need to make sure we bring the spirit of something like Working Girl to bear on it – the film starring Melanie Griffith – and that feel of sisters doing it for themselves, tapping into that energy.

It's exciting that the Everyman is creating the 40th anniversary production, but what makes Top Girls a play worth reviving four decades after it was written?

It’s worth it because we're yet to answer the questions that it throws up. We’re at a point where America is rolling back abortion rights, and we seem to have this relentless contempt for the idea that people might need support.

We haven’t answered its questions, and we’re at a point where the planet is on fire because we haven't.

And it’s worth reviving because Top Girls is acknowledged as one of the greatest plays ever written, by certainly our greatest living playwright. She’s relocating it to Liverpool for us, and she’s allowing us to fight a corner that's about the experience of women of colour in this country.

Are there any challenges in reviving it?

Not as many as you might think, as during the auditions I’ve been thinking that a lot of it sounds like the dispatches from the Tory party conference. For instance, in the play, Marlene talks about working-class people as being ‘too stupid, lazy or frightened’ to get a better job. 

One of the important things has been Caryl's inclusiveness around trans and non-binary casting, which we've been exploring through the casting process. That could have been a challenge, but I feel like we've been able to navigate that. 

And I think also, we're making a very clear statement about racial identity with the production. If you look at the original cast from 1982, Lindsay Duncan – a legend of British theatre – also played Lady Nijō, who is Japanese. We certainly wouldn’t do that. We’re assembling as diverse and inclusive a cast as possible.

On a technical level, there’s the play’s overlapping dialogue. In the play text, Caryl uses a ‘slash’ to indicate overlapping speech, and she invented that! Playwrights do it all the time now, but she invented this new way of writing plays, so the technical exercise of that is a challenge.

Have you learnt anything new about the play since you’ve been working on it?

If I didn’t know it already, I’m starting to realise what a genius Caryl is!

The first scene is extraordinary, and it suddenly clicked with me because it's this gathering of forgotten women from history who did the most incredible things, and Caryl brings them together and celebrates them.

But the scene falls apart – they start talking over each other, they get drunk, it degenerates into chaos, and what I think Caryl is saying is that to have succeeded as a woman in all those universes, they had to make themselves sharp. They had to.

And that means that if you're trying to win at a game that someone else has set up, you might not be able to collaborate. It makes you into an individualist. And a room full of individualists is never going to have a successful conversation – and that’s what forms Marlene. Genius!

Who else have you got on the creative team?

Ellie Light is designing, Nicola Chang is on sound design and Katharine Williams is our lighting designer.

They’re three of the most exciting collaborators I could have. It’s important for me to have an all-female identifying or non-binary team around the show to keep me in check.

And I've met dozens of phenomenal actors – I could cast this play a hundred times over!

Which words would you choose to describe your production?

It's sharp and slick. It’s about sophistication and glamour, and the danger that sits under that. 

It's also, fundamentally, about two sisters. Its final scene is one of the great pieces of writing for two women – two sisters whose lives have taken them on completely different journeys.

What do you hope Everyman audiences will get out of this show?

I hope they get an absolutely brilliant, stylish night out in a theatre – an experience that really speaks to the amazing diverse audiences we have in this city, people who have so consistently asked questions about authority and whether we're heading in the right direction.

I want audiences to come and feel like they're being supported and inspired and stimulated to have that conversation, and to have arguments in the bar afterwards about whether they're on Marlene's side or Joyce's side.

And I want them to know that this theatre, while I'm running it, is here for that.

Top Girls is at the Everyman from Fri 3 Mar to Sat 25 Mar 2023. Click here for more information and to book tickets.