Top girls

The play opens with an anachronistic dinner party hosted by Marlene, the newly-promoted manager of the Top Girls employment agency. Her guests are five women from the past: a transvestite Pope, a courtesan-cum-nun, a tireless adventurer, an obedient wife from Chaucer and the leader of a charge into hell from a Bruegel painting. The feminist themes introduced by this cacophonous scene echo throughout the more contemporary action of the play, as Churchill uses the setting of the `Top Girls' agency to allow a glimpse into the lives of several very different working women.