Marlene gives a dinner party to celebrate her promotion to managing director of Top Girls employment agency, but her guests are five women from the past (including Pope Joan and a character from a story by Chaucer). The following scenes are set in the agency, where we meet a variety of hopeful female clients, and in the home of Marlene’s sister, Joyce, who never left their Norfolk village and who cares for Marlene’s rejected daughter.

The final confrontation between the two sisters is a powerful expression of the conflict between the self-seeking materialism of the 1980s and human compassion.