(Charles Spencer’s article appeared in the Telegraph, 7/1.)
I’m a crusty old Tory while Caryl Churchill comes across as a pretty hard-line socialist and feminist. So you might expect me to have hated this revival of Top Girls. In fact the play, first staged in 1982, strikes me as a modern classic. It’s often splendidly funny and inventive, and, by the end, deeply moving, too.
This is a work in which a Left-wing writer confronts the phenomenon that was Margaret Thatcher during her years in Downing Street. For someone like Churchill, it must have been infuriating to contemplate a woman who had achieved the most powerful position in the land but who seemed so entirely inimical to all that the Left holds dear.