This Girl's Got Your Back: A Review of Girls on Top

If you didn't get to see Soulpepper's sold-out run of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls in 2007, or the award-winning remount with the same cast in 2008, then this film will make you wish you were better at booking your theatre tickets in advance. Or, more accurately, it will make you wish you had been a part of the production itself. For the duration of its snappy and engaging fifty-two minutes, Girls on Top, directed by Cassandra Nicolaou for Fighting Fish Pictures, is a pure celebration of theatre's emotional power and the heightened bond that actors create with one another when the story fits and the cast just clicks.

Generically, Girls on Top is a documentary about a theatre production, and, as such, it will be of wide interest to theatre and drama educators and to students considering a career in the arts. It includes scenes from the rehearsal room, and the viewer can implicitly trace the progression of the rehearsals by noting the subtle accumulation of costume pieces and performance "polish." The film takes us into the director's home for interview snippets about her motivations for mounting the play and also travels backstage to watch the actors' preparations and pre-performance rituals. The camera operates unobtrusively with no visible authorial intervention, which creates a feeling of immediacy and intimacy: we are there, as silent observers, as the actors face each stage of the process. The delivery of these stages is sharp and economical. The film knows its focus and keeps that focus front and centre. We hear only from people directly involved in the production, we learn about the actors' experiences both onstage and off, and the film steers clear of discussions about the production's design, technical requirements, or marketing approach. This is a film about theatre actors.

At times, the film also offers a meditation on Western feminism and women's lives from the early 1980s until the present, mirroring the preoccupations of the play text. When it was first produced in 1982, Top Girls was notable both for its direct uptake of issues faced publicly and privately by working women, set against the backdrop of powerful individualism and Thatcherism, as well as for its experimentation with formal convention, seen in the scripting of overlapping dialogue and its nonchronological act structure. Having Soulpepper produce the play, director Alisa Palmer argues, grants it the status of "classic," lifting it out of its sometime designation as a dated piece of experimental feminism. In the feminist spirit of including both the domestic and public lives of women in its purview, the film interviews the actors about their careers and private lives and enters some of their homes. At one point, Liisa Repo-Martell, who plays Angie, introduces us to her preschool daughter and reflects on what it means to play a troubled teenager at this stage in her career. Her own journey as a mother has added a new layer to her professional decision-making process.

Cara Pifko doing her warm-up ritual before the dress rehearsal.
Video still courtesy of Cassandra Nicolaou

Cara Pifko and Ann-Marie MacDonald prepare in the dressing room.
Video still courtesy of Cassandra Nicolaou

As Palmer tells us, the play succeeds in putting women's lives and concerns on stage, but even while embracing this focus, she questions the play's variety of feminism because its outlook for women seems so bleak. Instead of helping one another, Palmer continues, the play's characters ultimately create more problems for one another. The first act, which is meant to celebrate Marlene's promotion at work, is instead marked by a series of revelations about personal and professional losses by the fantastical set of historical dinner guests. Patient Griselda and Lady Nijo both reveal how they had children taken away from them, Pope Joan recalls the moments leading to her death by stoning, and Isabella Bird mourns the loss of her dear sister. The second and third acts, set in the...