In Cloud Nine you could not always quite produce a logical reason why one thing followed another, but somehow you never doubted that it did. Top Girls … progresses in a similar zigzag way between present and past, realism and outrageous fantasy. The connections are just as much (and just as little) there for the reason to apprehend. And yet, to me at least, the pieces in the puzzle remain determinedly separate, never quite adding up to more than, well, so many fascinating pieces in a fascinating puzzle.

One thing about Caryl Churchill, you are never bored. Or hardly ever. Even the scene that sets the attention drifting here, the short glimpse of a present day rustic childhood which concludes a first half primarily taken up with very different things, is not so much boring in itself as too much of a let down after the long first scene...