As Van Badham points out in her program essay for the new Sydney Theatre Company production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, when the play was first performed in 1982, Maggie Thatcher had been the British prime minister for three years. The first wave of British feminism in the 1970s had identified the patriarchal structure of society and was debating the ways in which it could be deconstructed. But now a woman was in charge and she was behaving like the most testosterone-charged of her predecessors. Many a crusty old Tory could be heard to say approvingly, ‘Maggie’s the only man in the cabinet.’

In Top Girls Churchill asks the question, was the ultimate purpose of the feminist struggle merely for the benefit of a few women who had the luck, opportunity, and aggression to beat men at their own game or was it actually to change society. As Churchill says: ‘I wanted [Top Girls] to ... look as if it were going to be a celebration of women achieving things, and then to put the other perspectives on it, to show that just to achieve the same things that men achieved in capitalist society wouldn’t be a good object.’