Top Girls | Feminist Drama: The Politics of the Self: Churchill and Keatley
In the following essay on Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, author Jasbir Jain discusses how Churchill writes a feminist world to create an emotional space which develops a ‘‘collective description’’ of the characters' experience as women.
Caryl Churchill's Top Girls (1983) and Charlotte Keatley's My Mother Said I Never Should (1987) are plays with an all women cast. Men, though present in the stories, are absent from the stage. They occupy emotional space but not physical space. At the very outset there is a defining of space, a creation of a feminist world. Keatley deliberately kept the men offstage to provide a space for the women to interact among themselves, ‘‘to show the way women use language, silence and subtext when alone together’’; Churchill apparently does it for the purposes of...
[The entire page is 2932 words long]
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