Written in 1982
when Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her game following the Falklands
War, Caryl Churchill’s Top
Girls was an incendiary and urgent play about women in power, women
with power, and women and power. Now, thirty-one years later, with Thatcher’s
passing and the end of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership closer to home,
Churchill’s play – revived here by New Theatre – seems almost prescient.
While Top Girls can (naturally) be considered
to be a ‘period piece’, borne of the social and economic transformations
brought about by Thatcher’s election, it is more than a mere foretelling of the
1980s; it is an ashamedly revealing work which shows with alarming accuracy
just how little we have come as a society since that time, as Lyn Gardner wrote
in The Guardian
in 2002.
