SOURCE: "De-realised Women: Performance and Identity in Top Girls" in Modern Drama, Vol. XXX, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 376-88.

In the following essay, Marohl demonstrates how Top Girls succeeds in debunking the myth of the feminist hero whose achievements are gained through her imitation of powerful men rather than through the avenues of a "socially conscious feminism. "

For a decade now, deliberate confusion of dramatic roles and playfulness about otherwise serious concepts of gender and history have distinguished Caryl Churchill's plays from the work of mainstream playwrights in Great Britain and the United States. For instance, six performers in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire play twenty-four different dramatis personae with individual role assignments which vary from scene to scene and are unrelated to the performers' actual sexes. In the finale of Vinegar Tom, her "sequel" to Light Shining, two female performers portray two seventeenth-century theologians in the top hat and...