She’ll never be a Top Girl – as her beloved Marlene is, brutally, the first to say though not, mercifully, to her face. Equally suggestive, and disturbing on a more acutely personal level, is Angie’s appearance at her auntie’s workplace Course’s earlier portrayal of the angry Angie playing with a younger friend (Tess Benger, very good) has been unconvincing, a generalised idea of a torn teen, but she’s very touching as the girl whose dreams are destined to be ashes. Paton is excellent as the woman who pleads with Marlene to give up the top job in favour of her husband who can’t face working for a woman again a whole relationship, indeed a whole political structure, is summoned in one brief scene. Jullien has a good crack at the job-applicant who seems to be imitating a male stereotype, boasting about burning (i.e hurtling) down the motorway and ordering gin-and-tonics in the best hotels it’s written like a revue-sketch but she doesn’t get the androgynous quality that makes it real. The scenes involving her colleagues and clients stumble at the same fence as the Soulpepper production of a few years back they’re written in a particular chatty idiom that non-Britishers find it hard to get into. Article contentīyrne, the only performer who doesn’t double, plays the brittle hardness of Marlene, both here and in the succeeding office episodes, to the limit it may make her partial softening in the last scene more effective, but it’s tough going on the way. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Shorn of its wit and bravura, the scene seems merely gimmicky and the directorial notion of showing us the actresses at dressing-tables, helping one another out in preparing for their roles, doesn’t add much. But the others are vocally indistinct and temperamentally undefined, and the overall orchestration is clumsy. Rosling, in stark contrast to her modern role to come, is magically gentle as Chaucer’s Patient Griselda she arrives late but when she does her patience is monumental. Of the distinguished guests, Claire Jullien is delightfully blunt and unruffled as the apocryphal Pope Joan, stoned to death after giving birth during a pontifical procession and Laurie Paton steals a lot of thunder as Dull Gret (after Breugel), stuffing both her face and her shopping-bag in anticipation of hungrier days ahead. It looks as if it’s going to be great Sue LePage’s set gives a sumptuous round dinner-table instead of the long one that, in previous stagings, has made this posh party look like the Last Supper. In this production, the incoherence that briefly disfigures the last scene all but destroys the first. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
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