[Cloud Nine] and Top Girls, taken together, show that [Caryl Churchill] has evolved into a playwright of genuine audacity and assurance, able to use her considerable wit and intelligence in ways at once unusual, resonant and dramatically riveting.

Top Girls itself opens with the sort of dinner-party you might conjure up in some spectacularly fanciful game of Consequences. In the Prima Donna restaurant, Pope Joan, who supposedly spread her skirts over St Peter's throne in 854, is hobnobbing with a Japanese courtesan, a Victorian lady-traveller, Chaucer's ultra-patient Griselda, and Dulle Griet, whom Brueghel painted invading hell in apron and armour. All suffered, either personally or through the abuse of their children, and all coped with the buffeting of their eras, with extraordinary courage. Each tells her tale, sometimes in excitedly overlapping sentences: a device I first thought was supposed to add realism to [the] … production, but later suspected was meant to imply some lack of mutual attention. Women don't listen to each other enough, don't learn sufficiently from their accumulated experience.

Why else should they now be using the limited freedoms they have painfully won as gruesomely as they too often do? That's the question implicitly raised by the dinner-party's hostess, who is celebrating her appointment as managing director of an employment agency staffed by women as tough and callous as herself, if not quite as adept at slotting girls into a male-dominated business universe. Triumph for Marlene, as she's called, has been bought at the cost of great personal mutilation: meaning the loss of love, and specifically of motherhood, through the odd abortion and one big act of rejection. At this point Ms Churchill sensationally but successfully links the world of the employment agency with that of its boss-woman's sister, who toils in a council house to bring up a backward teenager. Unknown to her, this girl is Marlene's daughter. She handed her over, left for London, and now offhandedly dismisses her as 'a bit thick—she's not going to make it'. What use is female emancipation, Churchill asks, if it transforms the clever women into predators and does nothing for the stupid, weak and helpless? Does freedom, and feminism, consist of aggressively adopting the very values that have for centuries oppressed your sex?

The question becomes plonkingly explicit in a climactic row between Marlene and her sister, the one raving about Thatcher and the success-ethic, the other grimly demurring. That exchange sounds too much like mandatory Royal Court indignation, and could safely be toned down. After all, the play as a whole, arguing through and by human observation, leaves us in no doubt that a quivering finger is being pointed at a society whose highest good is 'making it'. It is articulate, eloquent, alive, proof in itself that we can no longer patronise women playwrights as peripheral. I think Caryl Churchill is well on the way to being a major talent.