41
to celebrate Marlene’s promotion but we are reminded that her success comes at 
the cost of the Kidds’ financial struggles. Churchill divides the audience’s  
sympathy in this scene to highlight the dangers of the individualistic nature of  
capitalism. 
Churchill uses the character of Marlene as a means of exhibiting negative  
personality traits to focus the audience’s attention on the negative impacts of 
Thatcher’s government. Marlene displays traits such as being career-driven,  
unemotional and self-centred – traits which were and are largely associated with 
Thatcher. Marlene is often harsh with her language, making the audience question 
whether we are supposed to like the character. This is not an uncommon view, as 
theatre practitioner Mary Luckhurst demonstrated, where in a 1982 production of 
the play, “the cast found Marlene difficult to like” (Luckhurst 2014). This negative 
representation of a high-powered woman was designed by Churchill to appeal to 
a demographic of working-class people who harboured similar negative feelings 
towards Thatcher. Later in the play, Marlene describes Thatcher as “a tough lady” 
which reflects the Prime Minister’s nickname “the Iron Lady”. This persona was 
cultivated due to Thatcher’s capitalist policies such as deregulation, privatisation 
and trade union reform which consistently impacted the welfare and economic 
stability of the working classes, therefore increasing social inequalities. 
However...  
Despite Marlene’s flaws, she is depicted throughout the play as a strong female 
character who is ambitious and independent. This ideal of womanhood in Amer-
ica was popular in the 1980s due to the increase in individual female success. 
However, as Churchill stated, this success was rarefied in England at the time and 
the identity of the powerful woman fell on Thatcher who was widely disliked. As a 
result, Churchill presents Marlene’s identity as unattractive to reflect Thatcher’s 
image, reinforcing the critique of capitalist Britain. 
And to sum up... 
Top Girls is still as prominent a piece of political theatre as it was in the 1980s. 
The play has been revived several times on a large scale since its initial success in 
1982, for instance at the National Theatre in 2019. Michael Patterson theorised the 
notion of intentionality when political theatre was initially gaining success in the 
mid-twentieth century, writing:  
	
Theatre with an intention to convert to a new way of thinking, or at least to 	
	
challenge old modes of thought, became more overtly political, questioning 	
	
not so much social morality as the fundamental organization of society, with 	
	
the emphasis on economics rather than on ethics. (2003:1) 

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