In 1982 Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls placed Churchill's name firmly with the best of her contemporaries. The play looks at women's relationship to work, and centres around a dinner party attended by some of the most famous and successful women of the world - from the 9th century Pope Joan to the party's host, Marlene, who is celebrating her latest promotion. In 1976 Churchill collaborated with the feminist theatre group Monstrous Regiment and produced Vinegar Tom, a play about witches. "The women accused of witchcraft were often those on the edges of society," Churchill later wrote, "old, poor, single, sexually unconventional. . I wanted to write a play about witches with no witches in it; a play not about evil, hysteria and possession by the devil but about poverty, humiliation and prejudice, and how the women accused of witchcraft saw themselves." Churchill's most well known play, Cloud Nine, opened at the Royal Court in 1979. Working with Joint Stock theatre company, the play explores the theme of sexual politics. With the first half of the play set in colonial Africa in 1880, Clive, a colonial administrator, introduces his wife Betty. She is played by a man. "My wife is all I dreamt a wife should be, And everything she is she owes to me." Betty replies: "I live for Clive. The whole aim of my life Is to be what he looks for in a wife. I am a man's creation as you see, And what men want is what I want to be." By the second half of the play - which is set in London in 1980 - but only 25 years on in the lives of the characters, Betty has found a new freedom and independence away from her husband, and she is now played by a woman.
