["Fen"] could well be called "Bottom Girls." As the author's "Top Girls" told of Marlene, a self-made businesswoman who sells out her provincial working-class roots and humanity for corporate success in London, so the new one examines the less privileged sisters such top girls leave behind….

As befits the shift in focus, the new play contains little of its predecessor's laughter: even as the audience enters …, it is swept up in a gloomy mist that pours out from the stage. "Fen" is dour, difficult and, unlike either "Top Girls" or "Cloud 9," never coy about its rather stridently doctrinaire socialism: it's the most stylistically consistent of Miss Churchill's plays and at times the most off-putting. It is also yet another confirmation that its author possesses one of the boldest theatrical imaginations to emerge in this decade….

As an impressionistic, class-conscious portrait of an agrarian community, the play recalls David Hare's … piece about a similar village in nascent revolutionary China, "Fanshen."…

The action unfolds on a stunning set …: the stage floor is carpeted with the dirt of the potato fields and surrealistically bordered by walls and furnishings suggesting the women's dreary homes. In … [the] eerie lighting—all shades of Thomas Hardy dankness, no sunlight—the 90 minutes of scenes loom in the icy dark like fragmented nightmares. One minute the women are picking potatoes in a thunderstorm; then, through startlingly sharp transitions, that dominant image gives way to the sight of two illicit lovers dancing in moonlight or a madonna-like portrait of mother and child or a forlorn Baptist revival meeting.

"We're all rubbish," says one of the suffering Baptists, "but Jesus still loves us, so it's all right." As in "Top Girls," Miss Churchill sees one and all as helpless, exploited victims of a dehumanizing capitalistic system. She further feels that women can only escape its clutches, as Marlene did, by adopting that system's most selfish, ruthless traits….

Most of the women in "Fen," however, are laborers, bound to the land by an age-old, oppressive tradition that enslaves them from birth to grave. As Miss Churchill presents these sad serfs, they can only ameliorate their misery in self-destructive ways: by drinking in a pub or gossiping or taking Valium or betraying one another or going mad. Yet if the playwright's definition of these women's choices is rigidly deterministic her concentrated dramatization of their lives has an open, poetic intensity that transcends the flat tendentiousness of mere agitprop….

"The earth's awake!," says one of [the characters at the conclusion of "Fen"]—and it's Miss Churchill who has awakened it. Here's a writer, amazingly enough, who is plowing new ground in the theater with every new play.