He very quickly cast Gwen Taylor as Marlene, who astonishingly came in and learned it in nine days. That shocked us, because it was so late in the day, but you have to credit him for not giving up I think he felt he had been neglecting the rest of us. Nine days before we were due to open, he fired Lynn Dearth, who was playing the lead, Marlene. I've got you together because we're going to discover what this play is." He admitted it was a bit of a mystery – it was a great show of confidence in us.
I remember Max saying on the first day: "Look, you're not just a random bunch of actresses. Posterity decides these things for you: there's no accounting for it, but it's very good when it works out in your favour. If someone had told me in 1982 that this would be considered one of the 100 best plays of the century, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Of course, you never know when something's going to be a hit. Joe likes the show," and going into the rehearsal to find all the actors capering about because the doorman had given them the same news.ĭirecting Top Girls was like being behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce: it's a wonderful machine that works, whether you can drive it or not. I remember one day the doorman at the theatre saying, "Morning, Max. The power (or tyranny) of a producer in New York should not be underestimated, and Joe Papp taught me as much about producing as Bill Gaskill taught me about directing. Then it transferred to Joe Papp's Public Theater in New York, where it was shamelessly marketed as a London hit, and we were able to bring it back to London as a New York hit – which it was. We played to good notices, but not raves. It nearly ended in disaster: I had to fire somebody in the penultimate week and recast it. How much funny business can Dull Gret get away with? How do the characters respond when the pope walks in? The play was an emotional jigsaw puzzle – the surreal dinner party, the slick world of the 1980s office, a little girl's backyard – and making all that fit was important. You're presenting the audience with a coup de theatre that has to be sustained for 40 minutes, bringing realism to surrealism. That was the biggest challenge, getting the rhythms of that right.
It was very very daunting for the actors, particularly that first scene: they were speaking over one another and playing these strange characters from history.
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