Thea Sharrock's production of Caryl Churchill's play about women's lives surfaced at London's BAC over a year ago. Since then, Sharrock has become the artistic director of Southwark Playhouse and proved that she is no one-hit wonder.
Now her Top Girls production has been picked up by the canny Oxford Stage Company and remodelled for larger stages. The result is a meeting of heart and head, and a collision between a first-rate playwright and a seriously good young director who was primary-school age when Top Girls was premiered at the Royal Court in 1982.
In the first act, Marlene, the newly appointed managing director of Top Girls employment agency, is celebrating her promotion by holding a dinner. Her guests are from history, all representing different facets of women's experience: Pope Joan, patient Griselda, Isabella Bird, Lady Nijo.
In the second act we see Marlene at work in the employment agency, and a surprise visit paid by Angie, Marlene's daughter, whom Marlene abandoned to the care of her sister Joyce back home in the Fens. The final act skips back a year to a visit home made by Marlene. It is a hurricane of sisterly bile and love, and a reminder that the advances of one woman do not necessarily facilitate the advances of others. You only have to look at Thatcher, whose legacy hangs like a pall over Top Girls, to understand that.
This exhilarating play wears its arguments with passion and yet lightly. It is a model of play-writing in that it never tells, it always shows. It has density and clarity; its meanings surface like air bubbles in a muddy mill pond, and Sharrock aids the process with this sharp, detailed production.
At Gardner Arts Centre, Brighton (01273 685861) until Saturday, then tours.
