Top Girls

The reviews are in.

“There is a gut-wrenching intensity that colors every moment of the Frank Theatre’s excellent staging of Caryl Churchill’s TOP GIRLS. Director Wendy Knox and a fine cast have polished every facet of this imaginative and complex look at the choices upwardly mobile women face in Margaret Thatcher’s England. The play is a passionate, intelligent and always novel examination of the choices that women face in their lives, choices that are not necessary for most men. Knox has plumbed this play to its depths and brought out a consuming sense of sadness and loss. Throughout her enthralling staging, one is touched by the pain and complexity of these lives. Knox takes us inside a woman’s experience and reveals it with feeling and sensitivity. She also summons some superb performances from the seven actresses who play a total of 16 roles. Bernadette Sullivan gives Marlene a controlling toughness that gives the production a strong focus. Sullivan finds the pervading ambition but tempers it with enough softness to make us feel the huge cost of Marlene’s rise to power. Mary Alette Davis is exceptional in three roles. She captures the Scottish eccentricity of Isabella Bird and makes the most of a brief appearance as the wife of a man who has suffered in Marlene’s ascension. But it is as Joyce that Davis brings her best and most understanding work. She makes this dowdy symbol of the English working class a moving, proud protector of tradition and individual worth.”

Peter Vaughan, Star Tribune