# Top Girls
**Top Girls** is a 1982 play by the British playwright [Caryl Churchill](https://www.edgepedia.org/caryl-churchill) in which Marlene, a newly promoted managing director of a London employment agency, celebrates at a dinner party with five women drawn from history, legend, and art, while the play goes on to expose the personal and political price of her individualist success[1](https://www.concordtheatricals.com/s/1798/top-girls). Written for an all-female cast, it is regarded as one of the most important works of feminist drama and is commonly described as one of the best British plays of the twentieth century[2](https://livingarchive.royalcourttheatre.com/plays/top-girls-3/) • [3](https://www.spotlightonlake.com/posts/raven-theatre-announces-cast-crew-top-girls).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Author | Caryl Churchill, born 3 September 1938 in London[1](https://www.concordtheatricals.com/s/1798/top-girls) |
| Premiere | Royal Court Theatre, London, 28 August 1982, directed by Max Stafford-Clark[1](https://www.concordtheatricals.com/s/1798/top-girls) |
| New York transfer | Joseph Papp's Public Theater, 29 December 1982; Obie Award for Best Play, 1983[1](https://www.concordtheatricals.com/s/1798/top-girls) |
| Broadway premiere | Biltmore Theatre, 7 May to 29 June 2008, Manhattan Theatre Club, directed by James Macdonald; 63 performances[4](https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/top-girls-460191) |
| National Theatre | Lyndsey Turner's production at the Lyttelton, 26 March to 20 July 2019, 57 performances, cast of 18[5](https://catalogue.nationaltheatre.org.uk/calmview/Record.aspx?id=PERF10777&src=CalmView.Performance) |
| Structure | Three acts across reversed time, with doubled or tripled roles in most productions[6](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/top-girls-national-theatre-caryl-churchill-cast-past-present-a4104636.html) |
| Television | BBC television adaptation broadcast in 1992[7](https://cdn.casarotto.co.uk/uploads/files/cvs/ChurchillCV_newheader.pdf?v=1710436378) |
## Story and structure
The play is set in England in the early 1980s[4](https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/top-girls-460191). Its famous opening scene is a dinner party in a London restaurant, hosted by Marlene to celebrate her promotion to managing director of the Top Girls employment agency[2](https://livingarchive.royalcourttheatre.com/plays/top-girls-3/). Her guests are women who cannot have existed in the same room: [Pope Joan](https://www.edgepedia.org/pope-joan), the possibly mythical medieval female pope; [Isabella Bird](https://www.edgepedia.org/isabella-bird), the nineteenth-century Scottish explorer; Lady Nijo, the thirteenth-century Japanese concubine and later Buddhist nun; Patient Griselda, the obedient wife from the Clerk's Tale in [Geoffrey Chaucer](https://www.edgepedia.org/geoffrey-chaucer)'s *Canterbury Tales*; and Dull Gret, the peasant woman from Flemish legend who leads an attack on hell in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting[8](https://stageandcinema.com/2026/03/02/top-girls-raven-theatre/). Each guest's story is one of suffering under male power, and the scene runs on overlapping, interrupted dialogue in which the women speak over one another[9](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jan/16/how-we-made-top-girls).
The later acts move between the agency's offices, where Marlene interviews job candidates and dismisses the wife of a colleague she has overtaken, and the kitchen of her sister Joyce, a working-class woman who raised Marlene's daughter Angie as her own[2](https://livingarchive.royalcourttheatre.com/plays/top-girls-3/). Act 2 is set in the present, and act 3 returns a year earlier to Joyce's kitchen, so the narrative runs backward in time and reveals the family history piecemeal[10](https://actonians.co.uk/Productions/201-top-girls.html). The confrontation between the sisters stages, in personal terms, the clash between an individualist, Thatcher-supporting feminism and a socialist one[11](https://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/top-girls-national-theatre-review-dazzlingly-perceptive-classic).
**Themes.** Churchill was responding to the election of [Margaret Thatcher](https://www.edgepedia.org/margaret-thatcher) as Britain's first female Prime Minister and to the question of whether a woman's rise to power in a Conservative government, or in corporate life, counts as a feminist success[12](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/98B464EC7C3E6697B20B38C353C633F1/9781009534246AR.pdf/caryl-churchills-eco-socialist-feminism.pdf). By her own description, the play began with a loosely formed notion of women out of history meeting a contemporary woman over coffee, Thatcher's electoral victory, unease that women rising through the corporate ranks in North America was being celebrated as a triumph for feminism, and the notion of two sisters, one remaining at home as the other departed to remake her life[12](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/98B464EC7C3E6697B20B38C353C633F1/9781009534246AR.pdf/caryl-churchills-eco-socialist-feminism.pdf). Critics read the play as a critique of bourgeois feminism: Marlene has ascended from proletarian roots to an executive position, but she has abandoned her daughter, and the play asks who is left behind when individual women succeed[1](https://www.concordtheatricals.com/s/1798/top-girls). Rebecca Cameron's study places its dinner party in a line of British feminist pageantry running back to Cicely Hamilton's *Pageant of Great Women* (1909), arguing that Churchill, unlike the suffrage pageants, exposes the gaps and fissures beneath fantasies of united sisterhood[13](https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol43/iss2/1/).
## Production history
The Royal Court production transferred to the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York in December 1982[1](https://www.concordtheatricals.com/s/1798/top-girls). The play won the 1983 Obie Award for Best Play and was the runner-up for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize[1](https://www.concordtheatricals.com/s/1798/top-girls) • [14](https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/top-girls). [Lesley Manville](https://www.edgepedia.org/lesley-manville) and [Lindsay Duncan](https://www.edgepedia.org/lindsay-duncan) were among the original London cast[6](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/top-girls-national-theatre-caryl-churchill-cast-past-present-a4104636.html). The original seven-actor doubling became conventional: in the 1982 economy of the first production, finances dictated a small cast, and subsequent companies kept the practice, with a single actress, for example, playing Pope Joan in the dinner scene and Angie in the domestic scenes[4](https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/top-girls-460191).
Revivals have appeared roughly once a decade. London stagings include the Royal Court revival of 1991, a 2006 LAMDA production, and a 2011 [Chichester](https://www.edgepedia.org/chichester) and Trafalgar Studios production[2](https://livingarchive.royalcourttheatre.com/plays/top-girls-3/) • [15](https://officiallondontheatre.com/show/top-girls-73186/). The play reached Broadway in 2008, when Manhattan Theatre Club staged it at the Biltmore Theatre under James Macdonald with a cast including [Elizabeth Marvel](https://www.edgepedia.org/elizabeth-marvel) as Marlene and [Martha Plimpton](https://www.edgepedia.org/martha-plimpton), who was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play; Marisa Tomei was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress[4](https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/top-girls-460191).
**The 2019 National Theatre production.** Lyndsey Turner's staging at the Lyttelton Theatre was the National Theatre's first production of the play, opening on 26 March 2019 and closing on 20 July 2019 after 57 performances[5](https://catalogue.nationaltheatre.org.uk/calmview/Record.aspx?id=PERF10777&src=CalmView.Performance). It was also the first production to cast separate actors for each of the 18 roles, as Churchill's text originally specifies, rather than using doubling[6](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/top-girls-national-theatre-caryl-churchill-cast-past-present-a4104636.html). Katherine Kingsley played Marlene and Liv Hill played Angie, receiving a Stage Debut Awards nomination for Best Actress in a Play[5](https://catalogue.nationaltheatre.org.uk/calmview/Record.aspx?id=PERF10777&src=CalmView.Performance). Reviews were divided on the enlarged scale: Time Out gave it five stars and called it the widescreen production the play had always deserved[16](https://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/top-girls-review), while The Guardian's reviewer felt the cast of 18 diluted the piece's focus[17](https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/apr/04/top-girls-review-caryl-churchill-revival-lyttelton-national-theatre).
## Reception and afterlife
Top Girls is an A-level and university set text in Britain, and the playwright's agent lists a BBC television adaptation first broadcast in 1992[7](https://cdn.casarotto.co.uk/uploads/files/cvs/ChurchillCV_newheader.pdf?v=1710436378) • [16](https://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/top-girls-review). The Royal Court counts it among the plays from its history that are now regularly produced nationally and internationally[18](https://royalcourttheatre.com/about-us/our-story/). Productions continue into the present: Chicago's Raven Theatre staged it in 2026, with a companion piece, *Pot Girls*, playing alongside it[19](https://www.chicagoonstage.com/a-chilling-top-girls-and-some-pot-girls-chill-at-the-raven/), and the Essendon Theatre Company in Melbourne scheduled a 2026 season with auditions in April[20](https://vdl.org.au/vdl-audition/top-girls/).
## References
1. [Top Girls, Concord Theatricals](https://www.concordtheatricals.com/s/1798/top-girls)
2. [Top Girls (1991), Royal Court Living Archive](https://livingarchive.royalcourttheatre.com/plays/top-girls-3/)
3. [Raven Theatre Announces Cast & Crew of Top Girls, Spotlight on Lake](https://www.spotlightonlake.com/posts/raven-theatre-announces-cast-crew-top-girls)
4. [Top Girls – Broadway Play – Original, IBDB](https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/top-girls-460191)
5. [Top Girls performance record, National Theatre catalogue](https://catalogue.nationaltheatre.org.uk/calmview/Record.aspx?id=PERF10777&src=CalmView.Performance)
6. [Top Girls at the National Theatre, The Evening Standard](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/top-girls-national-theatre-caryl-churchill-cast-past-present-a4104636.html)
7. [Caryl Churchill CV, Casarotto Ramsay](https://cdn.casarotto.co.uk/uploads/files/cvs/ChurchillCV_newheader.pdf?v=1710436378)
8. [Top Girls Review Chicago, Stage and Cinema](https://stageandcinema.com/2026/03/02/top-girls-raven-theatre/)
9. [How we made: Max Stafford-Clark and Lesley Manville on Top Girls, The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jan/16/how-we-made-top-girls)
10. [Top Girls, Actonians Drama Group synopsis](https://actonians.co.uk/Productions/201-top-girls.html)
11. [Top Girls, National Theatre review, The Arts Desk](https://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/top-girls-national-theatre-review-dazzlingly-perceptive-classic)
12. [Caryl Churchill's Eco-Socialist Feminism, Cambridge University Press](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/98B464EC7C3E6697B20B38C353C633F1/9781009534246AR.pdf/caryl-churchills-eco-socialist-feminism.pdf)
13. [From Great Women to Top Girls: Pageants of Sisterhood in British Feminist Theater, Comparative Drama](https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol43/iss2/1/)
14. [Top Girls, Encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/top-girls)
15. [Top Girls, Official London Theatre (2006 LAMDA production)](https://officiallondontheatre.com/show/top-girls-73186/)
16. [Top Girls review, Time Out London](https://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/top-girls-review)
17. [Top Girls review, The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/apr/04/top-girls-review-caryl-churchill-revival-lyttelton-national-theatre)
18. [Our Story, Royal Court Theatre](https://royalcourttheatre.com/about-us/our-story/)
19. [A Chilling Top Girls, and Some Pot Girls Chill at the Raven, Chicago On Stage](https://www.chicagoonstage.com/a-chilling-top-girls-and-some-pot-girls-chill-at-the-raven/)
20. [Top Girls audition notice, Victorian Drama League](https://vdl.org.au/vdl-audition/top-girls/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Theater and dance › Theater forms, genres, and history › Genres, movements, and special forms › Political and identity-based theater › Feminist theater*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license