SOURCE: Marohl, Joseph. “De-realised Women: Performance and Identity in Top Girls.” Modern Drama 30, no. 3 (September 1987): 376–88.

In the following essay, Marohl discusses the class discrimination that exists amongst workers of varying rank and wage levels in Churchill's Top Girls.

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 of mainstream 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...