15.10.2026
Tenko and Threads actor Maggie Ford directs nine Peak District women in Caryl Churchill’s landmark play, with five performances across Bakewell and Matlock
It regularly appears on lists of the greatest plays ever written. This Saturday it opens in Bakewell. Chatsworth Players stage Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls at The Medway, Bakewell, on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October, then at Imperial Rooms, Matlock, from Friday 23 to Sunday 25 October.
Top Girls begins with one of the most famous opening scenes in modern theatre. Marlene has just been promoted at the Top Girls employment agency, and she is celebrating with a dinner party. Her guests are five women from history, art and legend: the Victorian explorer Isabella Bird, Lady Nijo, a concubine at the thirteenth century Japanese court who became a wandering Buddhist nun, Dull Gret from the Bruegel painting, Pope Joan, who is said to have ruled disguised as a man, and Chaucer’s Patient Griselda. They eat, drink, laugh and talk over one another. Then the play moves to a London employment agency and a back yard in Suffolk, and asks what Marlene’s success cost and who paid for it.
“I have wanted to direct this play for years,” said director Maggie Ford. “Caryl Churchill wrote it in 1982, and what astonishes me is not how much has changed since, but how little. The shoulder pads have gone. The question has not.”
First staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1982, Top Girls was named one of the 100 most significant plays of the twentieth century in the National Theatre’s NT2000 poll of theatre professionals. Written at the height of the Thatcher years, it never says whether one woman’s success is a victory for all women. It sets a table and lets the question be asked.
Maggie Ford knows the play from both sides, having performed in it herself as a professional actor. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and her stage work includes Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War! and the National Theatre. On television she appeared in Tenko, in the BBC’s Threads, filmed in Sheffield in 1984, and in EastEnders, which she went on to direct. She has also worked with Clean Break, the theatre company for women who have been through the criminal justice system, and contributed research to the original Royal Court production of Our Country’s Good, which she directed for Chatsworth Players in November 2024.
A cast of nine women from around the Peak District share sixteen roles, most playing one character from history and one from 1982. Rachel Wilson plays Marlene, alongside Sheila Sly, Helen Rogers, Jo Petch, Kate Stuart, Vanessa Vaughan, Lilly Posnett, Jo Greene and Tess Edmonds.
“The greatest pleasure has been watching nine women from villages across these dales take hold of it,” said Maggie. “We have rehearsed through dark evenings in cold halls, and somewhere in that a group of neighbours quietly became a company. I am very proud of them.”
She added: “I hope you laugh more than you expect, and I hope you are still arguing about it in the car on the way home.”
Chatsworth Players are supporting Refuge, the UK’s largest specialist domestic abuse organisation, as their chosen charity this year. There will be a collection at every performance.
LISTINGS INFORMATION
What: Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, presented by Chatsworth Players and directed by Maggie Ford
Bakewell: Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October 2026, 7.30pm, The Medway, Bakewell
Matlock: Friday 23, Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 October 2026, 7.30pm, Imperial Rooms, Matlock
Tickets: £15
Booking: https://www.google.com/url?q=
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