As the host, Kingsley shows no skill in martialing this when her character is nominally in control.

You would need the hearing of a bat to make out every subtlety of this in the Lyttelton but even the overlapping and general cadence of the conversations seem lost. I even felt that Churchill’s dialogue innovations in which the characters interrupt each other, speak over one other and even pick up from a previous speech that has been halted by an interruption, had received little care from director and cast. The scene should have many changes of pace as the women reflect on their life histories, become raucous, drunken and euphoric. (The restaurant scene is in fact shrunk down by designer Ian MacNeil.) But if matters prove confusing and a profusion of jokes - many of them first-rate - consistently misfire then the evening has got off to a bad and perplexing start.Īshley McGuire, standing, as Dull Gret. There must be a myriad of ways that a director can point the audience to such a realization even in this performance space whose aspect ratio makes many visitors think of a widescreen cinema. However you spin the scene, the assumption surely is that with no friends of her own, Marlene is dreaming this, imagining it, or matters are in some way surreal, non-literal or fantastical. The diners include the explorer Isabella Bird (Siobhan Redmond excellent), Dulle Griet from the Bruegel painting (Ashley McGuire failing miserably to convey any of the physical comedy clearly indicated in the role) and Amanda Lawrence who excels with the liturgical language of the quasi-apocryphal medieval female Pope Joan. There is something odd about her guests they are all women from history, fiction or art. The piece begins with ghastly employment agency executive Marlene (Katherine Kingsley) celebrating her appointment to the position of managing director of a recruitment company by hosting a dinner party in a swanky restaurant. You have to assume that Turner would accept the general premise of the signature opening scene. I doubt this based on the current outing of Churchill’s landmark 1982 play Top Girls in the notoriously wide space that is the Lyttelton. There is theatre critic equivalent of locker room gossip suggesting that director Lyndsey Turner has a good channel of communication to playwright Caryl Churchill.

Theatrical review of top girls play