Marlene has been promoted to managing director of a London employment agency and is celebrating. The symbolic luncheon is attended by women in legend or history who offer perspectives on maternity and ambition. In a time warp, these ladies are also her co workers, clients and relatives. Marlene, like her famous guests, has had to pay a price to ascend from proletarian roots to the executive suite: she has become, figuratively speaking, a male oppressor and even coaches female clients on adopting odious male traits. Marlene has also...

The dialectic of Top Girls is wide-ranging, covering universal dilemmas facing women, but focuses on major themes of contemporary life. The critique of feminist ambitions is a clear central theme and Churchill's selection of women from the past and modern world shows sympathy for the feminist cause and disdain for the male oppressor, but there is no sentimentality an no comfortable solution is offered for their problems.

Marlene hosts a dinner party in a London restaurant to celebrate her promotion to managing director of 'Top Girls' employment agency. Her guests are five women from...

In Traps, a set of characters meet themselves and their pasts to create "plenty of sinewy lines and joyous juxtapostions"--Plays and Players
Vinegar Tom "is set in the world of seventeenth-century witchcraft, but it speaks, through its striking images and its plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century..."--Tribune
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is set during the Civil War and "unflinchingly shows the intolerance that was the obverse side of the demand for common justice. Deftly, it sketches in the kind of social conditions.. that led to...

"Softcops renders the philosophy of Foucault as a music-hall turn and Victorian freakshow "theatre and history combine to give such intelligent fun" --The London Standard
"Top Girls brings five great and less-than-great women from history together for a dinner party and "has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert"--Sunday Times
Fen scrutinizes the lives of the low-paid women potato pickers of the fens (in Eastern England) and "the playwright pins down her poetic subject matter in dialogue of...

Serious Money is perhaps Caryl Churchill's most provocative play. It is a satirical study of the effects of the "Big Bang" boom of financial markets in the 1980s and how it gave rise to hectic, chaotic, high velocity work where human values are compromised for success and wealth.

The dialogue of the play is largely overlapping with the ingenious rhyming couplets and singsong verse. It is so stylized that Churchill even includes a rhymed soliloquy and a rap number. Language in the play is coarse, there being a particular emphasis on scatological humour, and the tone is...