Set in the early Thatcher years, Top Girls is a serminal play of the modern theatre, revealing a world of women's experience at a pivotal moment in British history. Told by an eclectic group of historical and modern characters in a continuous conversation across ages and generations, Top Girls was hailed by The Guardian as "the best British play ever by a woman dramatist."

Commentary and notes by Bill Naismith and Nick Worrall

In Traps, a set of characters meet themselves and their pasts to create "plenty of sinewy lines and joyous juxtapostions"—Plays and Players

Vinegar Tom "is set in the world of seventeenth-century witchcraft, but it speaks, through its striking images and its plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century…"—Tribune

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is set during the Civil War and "unflinchingly shows the intolerance that was the obverse side of the demand for common justice. Deftly, it sketches in the kind of social conditions.. that led to hunger for revolution…The play has an austere eloquence that precisely matches its subject."—The Guardian

Cloud Nine sheds light on some of the British Empire's repressed dark side and is "a marvelous play - sometimes scurrilous, always observed with wicked accuracy, and ultimately, surprisingly, rather moving. It plunges straight to the heart of the endless convolutions of sexual mores…and does so with acrobatic wit."—Guardian

Owners:"I was in an old woman's flat when a young man offering her money to move came round, that was one of the starting points of the play"—Caryl Churchill

The plays in this volume represent the best of Churchill's writing up to and including her emergence onto the international theatre scene with Cloud Nine.

"Softcops renders the philosophy of Foucault as a music-hall turn and Victorian freakshow "theatre and history combine to give such intelligent fun" —The London Standard

"Top Girls brings five great and less-than-great women from history together for a dinner party and "has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert"—Sunday Times

Fen scrutinizes the lives of the low-paid women potato pickers of the fens (in Eastern England) and "the playwright pins down her poetic subject matter in dialogue of impressive vigour and economy"—Financial Times

Serious Money is a satirical study of the effects of the Big Bang - "Pure genius…the first play about the city to capture the authentic atmosphere of the place."—Daily Telegraph

“Caryl Churchill’s power to grip an audience is an extraordinary thing. Her plays perform a pincer-movement on your attention. Their ear for a subject of real concern out there in the world . . . has always been acute, and often prescient. These are plays which don’t merely debate issues: they embody them.”—The Observer

“Churchill is one of the most original and unpredictable of dramatists, and part of the pleasure of her work is going into the theater, and not having the faintest clue about what to expect.”—Daily Telegraph

Jack would do anything for Sam. Sam would do anything. And around this simple premise, Caryl Churchill slyly crafts her new play depicting a deeply dysfunctional gay relationship—which is actually all about America. Premiering in fall 2006 at London’s Royal Court Theatre, this is Churchill’s first work since A Number and is another speedy, taut, two-hander that shows off her uncanny ability to write both topically and elliptically at the same time. With this play Churchill—who has taken on everything from Thatcherism to human cloning—continues her more than thirty-year tradition of producing “studies of a world quaking under constant siege in which style somehow always uniquely mirrors content” (The New York Times).

Caryl Churchill is one of the most respected dramatists in the English-speaking world. She is the author of some twenty plays, including Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Serious Money, The Skriker, Blue Heart, Far Away, and A Number, which have been produced throughout the world.