Marlene’s almost continual presence in Top Girls is evidently not the only reason why she can be seen as the protagonist. However, the fact that she appears so often on stage is one of the key ways it is shown. What is more, she makes her presence felt; participating in conversations, giving orders and clearly giving her opinions, as we see in the third act during her arguments with Joyce. It is thanks to the many dialogues which she participates in that we learn so much about her background, which leads to her being a very well developed character. As well as this, her presence in each act marks her out from the others. Indeed, the fact that she is there despite the completely different settings and unconnected characters in the different acts shows that she is a vital part of the play: she links everything together.
Like Marlene, Angie’s character is reasonably well developed, not only through what she says but also through what others say about her. As well as this, she is the only other character who “crosses over” into the different “worlds” presented in the play. What’s more, the scene focused entirely on her (act 2, scene 2) intersects the Top Girls agency scenes, thus highlighting her importance and allowing us to compare her “world” to Marlene’s.
Although Angie appears less in the play (and not at all in the first act), she actually conforms to the first definition given of a protagonist better than Marlene as her intentions and ambitions are spoken of whereas Marlene’s intentions are not. Indeed, Angie seems interested in her own future, telling Win she wants to work at the agency, and even Marlene talks about what will happen to her, saying she’ll be a “packer in Tesco”.
In contrast to Angie, who seems to be at least trying to find her own future, we never see Marlene take any real action. Everything she has done is in the past (going to America etc.) or takes place in between acts (her promotion).
As well as her actions, we can also notice the evolution in Angie’s psychological state, an evolution which seems to go backwards due to the unconventional order of the acts. At the beginning of the last act, Angie seems happy and content, probably because of her Aunt’s visit, however, in the second act her whole attitude is completely different. She is violent, hurting Kit and threatening to kill her mother. She also seems discontent with her life as she says she’s “leaving”.
This change in character cannot be seen in Marlene, in all three acts she rejects Angie, in the first by not talking about her when the other women discuss their children, in the second by trying to get rid of her (she repeatedly asks Angie is she’ll “come back later”), and in the third by not recognising her as her child. As well as this we see no change of attitude towards men or work from the one she expresses in the third act, she says that “there’s always men” which gives us the impression that to her all men are the same, the audience gets the feeling that she is superior to men and doesn’t particularly like them despite her saying that she “needs” them.
Thus, we see that Marlene doesn’t really seem to have her own story appear in the play, she is more like one of the women in the first act telling her story to the audience through her conversations with others. Angie is the character who changes and acts, it is she who has a future before her. Thus, Angie seems to be the protagonist of Top Girls in terms of her being the primary focus of the story, with Marlene being a secondary character.
The fact that Angie doesn’t appear in the first act could be used to argue that she cannot be the protagonist of the play. Indeed, how can the main character not appear in a whole act of a three-act play? However, what takes place in the first act has no relation to the other acts in terms of story and plot development. Indeed, the first act seems to be more of a prologue to the play than anything else; it introduces us to the context in which Caryl Churchill places her female characters and gives us something with which to contrast and compare the modern characters in her play. Thus, it is unnecessary for Angie to appear in this act; we are not supposed to compare the characters from the past to her, but compare her to them in order to understand Churchill’s messages on modern feminism.
These messages concerning women’s place in a patriarchial society and their links and roles in different social classes are transmitted to the audience via the presence and backgrounds of both Marlene and Angie. Indeed, both characters seem essential to understanding Churchill’s ideas.
One of the main ideas we find in Top Girls is that modern feminisim does not help women be equal to men but requires them to become more like them in order to rise to the top, leaving the other, weaker women behind. While we are helped to understand this idea through the different interviews, we can see it completely through the Marlene and Angie’s characters and story.
In Marlene, we see a symbol of the strong career woman who has got to the top by sacrificing her femininity; her child, Angie. We realise the importance of her rejection of Angie for gaining her promotion thanks to the retrospective third act. The last few lines of the act are said after the explosive argument between Joyce and Marlene, the stage is quiet and still. Angie enters and calls for her mother, to which Marlene (her real mother) responds by saying “No, she’s gone to bed. It’s Aunty Marlene”. We have no way of knowing how this is meant to be acted, whether Marlene would show guilt, and thus gain the audience’s sympathy, or show herself to be uncaring about her rejection of her daughter. Either way, whether rejecting her daughter is a real sacrifice for Marlene or not, the audience understands the necessity of her doing so in order to succeed.
In Marlene’s rejection of Angie in both the second and third acts, the audience recognises not only a woman denying her responsibilities as a mother but also a woman who does not care about the future of those who are not like her. She interrogates Angie on why she came to see her but never seems interested in Angie herself. Indeed, it is Win who questions her about her future and discovers that she does have ambition, even if it is unlikely that she will achieve her aims because of her lack of qualifications. Marlene’s dismissal of Angie as being “a bit thick”, “ a bit funny” shows her attitude towards weaker women, and thus can be seen as representative of an attitude held by those women who lose their femininity in order to be “equal” to men who think women who don’t are not “going to make it”.
Thus, while Marlene and Angie are two rounded characters with their own pasts, they also represent two different types of women to the audience. Their relationship and attitudes represent the relationship and attitudes of these two different types of women. Therefore, we could say that while the only story which evolves in the play seems to be Angie’s, both she and Marlene represent certain groups of women.
However
However, as already said, Top Girls is a play full of storytelling with very few parts of the larger story involving Angie and Marlene actually being shown on stage. Thus, the audience could feel that while Angie is the protagonist of the small amount of action we do see, and thus the protagonist of the play, in each individual story there is another protagonist (normally the character who is actually telling the story). Indeed, all the different stories and scenes featuring different characters show that while Churchill’s main objective
was to write a play about modern womenPerhaps, Top Girls is not just a way for Churchill to show her opinions on women and work but also a representation of life itself for which there is no true central character: each person is their own protagonist in their own story.
Indeed, Top Girls is not a play about Angie or Marlene, it is a play about women.
Story=relationship b/w M and A, representative of relationship b/w poorer, weaker women and stronger ones
TG= 2 levels, 1st: stories, developped characters 2nd: representation of all women
Although Angie appears less in the play (and not at all in the first act), she actually conforms to the first definition given of a protagonist better than Marlene as her intentions and ambitions are spoken of whereas Marlene’s intentions are not. Indeed, Angie seems interested in her own future, telling Win she wants to work at the agency, and even Marlene talks about what will happen to her, saying she’ll be a “packer in Tesco”.