Churton Park Young Actors become Top Girls
Churton Park Young Actors become Top Girls

Top Girls by Caryl
Churchill
6pm Sat 28 Oct & 4pm Sun 29 Oct
Newtown
Community and Cultural Centre
Tickets $15/$10 eventfinda.co.nz
Churton Park
Young Actors are to produce Caryl Churchill’s most famous
play Top Girls in the final week of October. The students
train not only in acting but also in how to run a theatre
company. They have been working on casting, costuming,
rehearsing, fundraising and marketing since early March.
Meeting up once a week at their local community centre,
Churton Park Young Actors have been balancing school work,
drama, and the ebbs and flows of teenage life, to make this
show happen. The stresses of teenage life saw the show go
through three cast changes as other students were unable to
commit- including one just seven weeks ago. Top Girls has
been too important to let anything stop them so they have
recast, picked up extra roles and carried on,
Top
Girls will be the first show that the company has performed
on their own. They have previously performed in the last two
New Zealand Fringe Festivals with their award-winning sister
company, Wellington Young Actors. Together they wrote and
performed Squawk in 2016 and The Wirecutters which had a
season at BATS Theatre in February.
Top Girls focuses
on Marlene, a 1980’s businesswoman and her promotion to
Managing Director of Top Girls recruitment agency. Based in
Thatcher England, Marlene is a headstrong women, fighting
for status in a male-dominated, corporate world and who is
struggling to get along with her working class sister,
Joyce, and niece, Angie. Top Girls explores personal
sacrifices women have made in their attempt to achieve
equality and recognition.
The students have spent a
lot of time discussing the themes of the show and women's
political and social history of the 1980s. One event they
were particularly intrigued by was the UK’s Equal Pay Act
of 1970- this was introduced 47 years ago, the students
questioned how, despite this act, equal pay not yet been
achieved. Another theme of relevance to the teens has been
the central character’s (Marlene’s) pregnancy at the age
of seventeen (the same age of some of the company members)
and the choices she had to make as well as the struggle she
would have had to go through in making those choices.
Their director, actor Deborah Rea, insists that each
of the students must also take on one or more production
roles such as fundraising, marketing/social media,
advertising, set, costume and poster design. Through these
roles, they learn a various number of other skills that will
assist them to not only put on their own work in the future
but also enables them to be independent in a variety of
business pursuits- thereby preparing them to be Top Girls
themselves.
ends