A key moment in Caryl Churchill’s compelling and justly famous play Top Girls comes as go-getting, power-dressing, ball-breaking businesswoman Marlene (Caroline Catz) offers her views on social class to the very different sister — four charring jobs, endless drudgery, no prospects — whom she is visiting for the first time in six years at the family home in rural Suffolk they once shared.

Class? She doesn’t believe in it, she tells Joyce (Kirsten Hazel Smith). “Anyone can do anything if they have what it takes.”

“And what if they haven’t?”

Joyce’s reply, while it might seem applicable to her own situation, is in fact concerned with that of her daughter Angie (Victoria Gee). Aged 15 and in a remedial class at school, she can hope at best, we hear, for a job stacking shelves in Tesco. The truth of this can not be doubted.

First seen at the Royal Court in 1982, Top Girls was a clear challenge to the ideas of Margaret Thatcher, then in her post-Falklands pomp. Its first director Max Stafford-Clark, returning to the play for the fifth time in this gripping Out of Joint/ Chichester Festival co-production, rightly considers this to be a timely revival. In a post-performance talk on Tuesday he called it “a corrective to [the film] The Iron Lady”. He noted, too, that we again have a Tory-led government, seemingly settled in for a long run and with plans to cut benefits.

Happily, Churchill does not labour her political points. There is much to amuse in the celebrated opening scene which sees Marlene celebrating her appointment as boss of the Top Girls employment agency with a surreal dinner party attended by notable women of the past, real or imaginary.

These include the butch and intellectual female Pope, Joan (Esther Ruth Elliott); the Victorian explorer Izabella Bird (Kirsten Hazel Smith), whose Morningside accent and headstrong demeanour suggest a Jean Brodie of the Silk Road; and the white-faced Lady Nijo (Alix Dunmore), an eager-to-please concubine (later Buddhist nun) at the Japanese imperial court.

Egotists all, they struggle to outdo each other in speeches that build towards an hilarious shouting match.

Unfortunately, Churchill’s decision (unchallenged by the director) to overlay much of the dialogue — not to mention the various accents in which the lines are spoken — means that some of her wit passes unnoticed.

When the scene shifts to office life in the employment agency itself, there is much to relish, too, in observing how far the talents of some of the eager jobseekers fall below the level required to achieve their ambitions.

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