De-realised Women: Performance and Identity in Top Girls

De-realised Women: Performance and Identity in Top Girls JOSEPH MAROHL For a decade now, deliberate confusion of dramatic roles and playfulness about otherwise serious concepts of gender and history have distinguished Caryl Churchill's plays from the work ofmainstream playwrights in Great Britain and the United States. For instance, six performers in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire play twenty-four different dramatis personae with individual role assignments which vary from scene to scene and are unrelated to the performers' actual sexes. In the finale of Vinegar Tom, her "sequel" to Light Shining , two female performers portray two seventeenth-century theologians in the top hat and tails of music hall entertainers, singing with great irony the song "Evil Women." In a prefatory note to Traps, Churchill describes the playas an "impossible Object," like an Escher drawing: "In the play, the time, the place, the characters' motives and relationships cannot all be reconciled - they can happen on stage, but there is no other reality forthem.... The characters can be thought of as living many of their possibilities at once.'" The cast of seven performers in Cloud Nine, Churchill's first bona-fide commercial hit, play thirteen roles of varying age, gender, and race. In Act One, a white performer plays a black servant, a male performer plays the role of a woman, a female performer plays a boy, and a small dummy represents an infant girl. Act Two brings a degree of naturalism as women play women and men play men, with the exception of Cathy, a five-year-old girl played by a man. A stage note explains that "Act One takes place in a British colony in Africa in Victorian times. Act Two takes place in London in 1979. But for the characters it is twenty-five years later.,,2 Only three characters appear in both acts, and in all three instances the actors portraying them in the second act are not the same persons portraying them in the first. In Top Girls, an all-female cast of seven playa total of sixteen different characters, five of whom do not exist in the present. Even more recently. in Fen, five women and one man play twenty-two characters in an ambiguous setting which is simultaneously interior and exterior: in Annie Smart's 1983 stage design, "a field in a room." Performance and Identity in Top Girls 377 Multiple casting and transvestite role-playing, which modern directors ofthe 1940S and 1950S practiced deliberately in several experimental productions of Shakespeare and other standard dramatists, reflect the many possibilities inherent in the real world and subvert conventional ideas about the individuality or integrity of character. The theatrical inventiveness of Churchill's comedies suggests, in particular, that the individual self, as the audience recognizes it, is an ideological construct and the "real world," the world as it is recast by the performers, klieg lights, and chicken wire on the stage, consists of people and events which are individual only in so far as they are rhetorically defined in contrast to others. Her plays conceive character and event as paradoxes. People in her plays are not whole, though sometimes they are ignorant of their own fragmentation; they exist only in tension with their environment (time and space), the other people in the environment, and with the "others" who they themselves used to be at an earlier age (their former "selves"). Churchill describes the condition more vividly in dramatic terms in the closing image of Cloud Nine, when a character in Act Two confronts the version of herselffrom Act One: "BETTY and BETTY embrace.,,3 In performance, the plays assume obvious political importance, espousing the social concerns of contemporary feminism: gender stereotyping, the division of labor according to sex, the proprietary family, the oppression of sexual variety through compulsory heterosexuality, class struggle, ageism, and ethnocentrism. The dramatic events raise the audience's consciousness about social principles through the actions depicted and, more importantly, through the actual events of the performance: woman playing man, man playing woman, one person playing two (or more) persons, two persons playing one, the deconstruction of history and geography (and the related unities of time, place, and action) in order to dramatize...