ABSTRACT
Top Girls investigates working women across the economic spectrum in an era when authors such as Shirley Conran were polemicising that the modern go-getting woman could have an executive career, material wealth and the perfect domestic life. Caryl Churchill has written some of the most provocative parts for actresses in modern theatre, and the contrasting multiple roles offered in Top Girls have made it an irresistible challenge for many performers. The idea for Top Girls was seeded by a trip to America and Churchill's encounter with a more right-wing feminism that prompted her to think about the differences between socialist agendas in Europe and individualist neo-liberalism in the USA. Stafford-Clark has explained the confusion in the following terms: Top Girls gained an importance that was out of proportion to the script on its own terms because both Caryl and the play were turned into role models by critics, theorists and pedagogues.
