Description
Book SynopsisI believe in the individual. Look at me.Set in the early Thatcher years,
Top Girls is a seminal play of the modern theatre, revealing a world of women''s experience at a pivotal moment in British history. Told by an eclectic group of historical and modern characters in a continuous conversation across ages and generations it was described by
The Guardian as the best British play ever from a woman dramatist'. The play opens with an anachronistic dinner party hosted by Marlene, the newly-promoted manager of the Top Girls' employment agency. Her guests are five women from the past: a female Pope, a courtesan-cum-nun, a tireless adventurer, an obedient wife from Chaucer and the leader of a charge into hell from a Bruegel painting. The feminist themes introduced by this cacophonous scene echo throughout the more contemporary action of the play, as Churchill uses the setting of the Top Girls' agency to allow a glimpse into the lives of several very different working wome
Trade ReviewTop Girls has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert. You can smell life, and at the same time feel locked in an argument with an agile and passionate mind * John Peter, Sunday Times *
Ms Churchill is one of our best writers…her play is brilliantly conceived with considerable wit to illuminate the underlying deep human seriousness of her theme * Spectator *
A playwright of genuine audacity and assurance, able to use her considerable wit and intelligence in ways at once unusual, resonant and dramatically riveting -- Benedict Nightingale * New Statesman *
The work build to a superb emotion-draining climax that sent me out of the theatre convinced that this is the best British play ever from a woman dramatist -- Michael Billington * Guardian *
Table of ContentsForeword by Ann McFerran The Play
