Two sides of the same coin: A comparison of Caryl Churchill's 'Top Girls' and Charlotte Keatley's 'My Mother Said I Never Should'.

Abstract

Caryl Churchill was born in 1938, educated at Oxford, and wrote several radio plays before moving to the stage in 1972 with Owners. Since then she has continued to write mainly for the stage and has become the best known, and certainly most successful, contemporary British female playwright. Charlotte Keatley was bom in 1960, received a B.A. from the University of Manchester, an M.A. from Leeds University and has recently been a visiting fellow at Cambridge. She spent two years as a theatre critic, but has mainly lived from a combination of play-wrighting and the dole. Her work includes radio; a community play in Warrington, The Legend of Padgate, which included a cast of eighty; fifty-two speaking parts and thirty musicians, most of whom had never worked in theatre before, and which took place in two venues, between which the audience was bussed; and work with a performance art group called Visible Difference, as well as My Mother Said I Never Should. She is not mentioned in any critical works on women playwrights or feminist drama. Both of these women are concerned with the position of women in society and their representation in the theatre, but they manifest this concern in their work in vastly different ways. Churchill is a 'materialist playwright', who builds her plays 'upon detailed research into the situations they represent', she draws attention to the connections between capitalist patriarchal society's 'governing ideologies and actual material conditions'. Keatley is a 'feminist playwright deliberately reclaiming areas of lives omitted', who believes that 'the most powerful area of theatre [is] that its not only a five experience, but a completely three-D sensory experience, one in which things go up your spine and make your stomach turn over... and you see things which you can't explain in words, you feel things which you can't explain'. These differences are clearly outlined by the plays, Top Girls and My Mother Said I Never Should. They have many similarities, including productions around the world in the diverse cultures of countries such as Germany, Japan, and the United States. Yet their use of the elements particular to theatre puts them almost at opposite ends of the dramaturgical spectrum. Both plays have an all-woman cast who play multiple roles, contain non-naturalistic scenes, deviate from linear narrative structure, deal with mother/daughter relationships and the ideal of motherhood itself, tell the story of a woman who gives up her child to her sister/mother to raise in order to further herself, and therefore deal with the dilemma women face of career versus family, and both plays end with an ambiguous tone toward the progress of women in the future. Here is where the similarities end, however; the actual political messages and the theatrical ways in which they are deployed contrast greatly.