The cast was Selina Cadell, Lindsay Duncan, Deborah Findlay, Carole Hayman, Lesley Manville, Gwen Taylor and Lou Wakefield.
[5] In December 1982, the Public Theater programmed the play's American debut, with the Royal Court Theatre cast and creative team.
[6] Its run would end in 1983 with a cast of North American actresses: Lise Hilboldt (Marlene), Donna Bullock (Jeanine/Waitress/Win), Sara Botsford (Isabella/Joyce/Nell), Freda Foh Shen (Lady Nijo/Mrs.
[7] In 1991, the BBC and Rádio e Televisão de Portugal commissioned a televised production, reuniting Deborah Findlay (as Isabella/Joyce) and Lesley Manville (as Marlene) under Stafford-Clark's direction.
The rest of the cast was filled out by Lesley Sharp, Cecily Hobbs, Beth Goddard, Sarah Lam, and Anna Patrick.
The cast included Rachel Sanders, Zoe Aldrich, Elaine Claxton, Sara Houghton, Emma Pallant, Claire Redcliffe and Hayley Jayne Standing.
A 2011 revival at Chichester Festival Theatre, co-produced with Out of Joint and directed by the play's original director Max Stafford-Clark transferred to Trafalgar Studios in the West End, opening on 16 August 2011.
The cast included Suranne Jones, Stella Gonet, Olivia Poulet, Lucy Briers, Laura Elphinstone, Lisa Kerr and Catherine McCormack.
In 2019 a production was staged at the Royal National Theatre in London, starring Katherine Kingsley, Amanda Lawrence and Siobhan Redmond, and directed by Lyndsey Turner.
[11] In 2021, a Portuguese version of the play was directed by Cristina Carvalhal and presented in Queen Maria II National Theatre, in Lisbon.
[12] The play is set in the Britain of the early 1980s and examines the issue of what it means to be a successful woman, initially using "historical" characters to explore different aspects of women's "social achievement".
Marlene, the tough career woman, is portrayed as soulless, exploiting other women and suppressing her own caring side in the cause of success.
The play is famous for its dreamlike opening sequence in which Marlene meets famous women from history, including Pope Joan, who, disguised as a man, is said to have been pope between 854 and 856; the explorer Isabella Bird; Dull Gret the harrower of Hell; Lady Nijo, the Japanese mistress of an emperor and later a Buddhist nun; and Patient Griselda, the patient wife from The Clerk's Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
[13] All of these characters behave like a gang of city career women out on the town and get increasingly drunk and maudlin, as it is revealed that each has suffered in similar ways.
In Act I, scene 1, Marlene is depicted as a successful businesswoman, and all her guests from different ages celebrate her promotion in the 'Top Girls' employment agency.
In the next scene we jump to the present day (early 1980s) where we see Marlene at work in the surprisingly masculine world of the female staff of the agency, in which the ladies of 'Top Girls' must be tough and insensitive in order to compete with men.
In the same act, the audience sees Angie's angry, helpless psyche and her loveless relationship with Joyce, whom the girl hates and dreams of killing.
She began dressing as a boy at age twelve so she could continue to study; she lived the rest of her life as a man, though she had male lovers.
[14] Like all the dinner guests, Joan's life and attitude reflect something about Marlene; in particular how she had to give up her female body in order to "succeed" in her time.
The subject of the painting Dulle Griet by Pieter Breughel, in which a woman wearing an apron and armed with tools of male aggression – armor, helmet, and sword – leads a mob of peasant women into Hell, fighting the devils and filling her basket with gold cups.
Her rare speech is coarse, reductive and amusing while her relative silence adds an element of suspense up to the point where she recounts the tale of her invasion.
Lady Nijo is a thirteenth-century Japanese concubine who enters the play near the beginning of act one and proceeds to tell her tale.
She is instructed by her father to sleep with the emperor of Japan and reflects on it positively; she feels honored to have been chosen to do so when discussing it with Marlene in Act 1.
The play does not mention that she wrote several books, including An English Woman In America, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, and Among the Tibetans.
[17] For a long time, she lived with her mother and her younger sister, Henrietta Bird, whom she talks about with great affection during the dinner party.
In Act Two, Scene Two, the action turns to the "Top Girls" employment agency, where Nell and Win are sharing the latest office gossip, until Marlene arrives.
She is shy and awkward and her presence is clearly an unwelcome surprise to Marlene, who nevertheless offers to let Angie stay at her place overnight.
[22] In 1998 the critic David Benedict named Top Girls as his favourite "play of the [20th] century" writing that "Caryl Churchill's stunningly moving study of the enticements of power and the contradictions we are forced to face was groundbreaking in its reworking of the basic dramatic rules governing time, manner and place.
[24] In 2002, The Guardian published an article written by the critic Lyn Gardner about the enduring relevance of Top Girls as the play was being revived in the West End 20 years after its initial premiere.
In the article Gardner stated that Top Girls "can still lay claim to being one of the finest postwar British plays.