It’s a magic trick where understanding the trickery only makes the magic more real. We always know theatre isn’t “real” – by playfully acknowledging that, the emotional impact is actually heightened. An Oak Tree has a radical honesty which has made it hugely influential among younger generation. The actor is transformed before us we accept that they are now the father. At every performance, the father is played by an actor who’s never seen or read the play before they are given a script or fed lines by – yes – the hypnotist (played initially by Crouch himself, also acknowledging his “real” role as the playwright). Caryl Churchill (1938- ) is one of the most affluent socialist-feminist dramatist from Second Wave Feminism whose plays are politically drastic with essential. The father truly believes his daughter has been transformed into oak tree. A stage hypnotist encounters the father of a girl he killed in a car accident. On this, Tim Crouch’s glitteringly clever play really delivers – while also being extremely moving. What makes a great play? A lot of critics, academics, and playwrights themselves will point to form matching content. Her welcome is as insincere as poor Angie’s overture is needy. It adds to the expansive feel of Lyndsey Turner's production, particularly effective in the play's still audacious opening. By some instinct (and also because of a conversation she may have overheard) Angie has an obscure hunch that her adored “aunt” may be closer to her in truth and seeks her out at the “Top Girls” employment agency of which Marlene has just become the managing director. Angie has grown up with learning difficulties so the lottery of luck (which obviously disadvantages women disproportionately) has not fallen in the young girl’s favour. Will there ever come a day when women do not have to pay a steep price for the simple right to slam the doll’s house doors on the infantilising love of smug, purblind spouses or – in the case of Churchill’s superlative play that looks at the 1980s-vintage “success story” of Marlene – no longer worry that progress for some women may entail, in intractably difficult ways, the disadvantaging of others? Ways that were paradoxically heightened by the election of Mrs Thatcher, our first female prime minister.Ī pair of shoulder pads waiting to happen, Marlene forsook her rural working-class home for the bright lights of the city when she was 17, leaving her illegitimate baby, Angie, to her upwardly stationary sister. Both of these pieces woke their audiences up to the necessity of a feminist movement and also to the inescapable pain that comes from progress. One of the wonders of Top Girls, the Caryl Churchill classic first seen in 1982, is that it’s at once utterly original and yet shares (in a salutary way) attributes with that earlier, piercingly penetrating play that accelerated the women’s movement: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House(1879).
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