Top Girls was nominated for 'Best Play' at the 1982 Standard Drama Awards, although it was noted that the play "drew compliments rather than committed votes" from the judging panel.[18]
In his review of the 1983 Royal Court production of the play, The Guardian critic Michael Billington stated that he was convinced that Top Girls "is the best British play ever from a woman dramatist. That is not meant to be patronising".[19] He later in 1997 included the play in his list of the "10 best British plays of the [20th] Century".[20] In 2015 Billington selected the play for his list of the "101 greatest plays" ever written in any western language.[4] In 2016, he also included Top Girls in his list of "Ten great Royal Court plays", where he described the play as the "supreme achievement" of Max Stafford-Clark's era as artistic director of The Royal Court.[21]
In 1997 the playwright Mark Ravenhill wrote that Top Girls "must be the best play of the past 20 years".[22]
In 1998 the critic David Benedict named Top Girls as his favourite "play of the [20th] century" writing that "Caryl Churchill's stunningly moving study of the enticements of power and the contradictions we are forced to face was groundbreaking in its reworking of the basic dramatic rules governing time, manner and place. It was also utterly alive to the world in which she was writing and remains so today."[1]
The play was voted as one of the 100 most significant plays of the 20th century as part of a poll which was given to over "800 playwrights, actors, directors, theatre professionals and arts journalists"[23] and conducted by the Royal National Theatre as part of their NT2000 project to celebrate the new millennium.[24]
In 2002, The Guardian published an article written by the critic Lyn Gardner about the enduring relevance of Top Girls as the play was being revived in the West End 20 years after its initial premiere. In the article Gardner stated that Top Girls "can still lay claim to being one of the finest postwar British plays. With its postmodern approach to structure, chronology and, most obviously, language, including dialogue that interrupts and overlaps, it is certainly one of the most influential." She also wrote that the play's opening dinner party scene is "one of the most famous scenes in modern drama".[25]
Top Girls is listed as one of the 100 “best and most influential plays”[26] performed in Britain from 1945 – 2010 in the book and iPad app Played in Britain: Modern Theatre in 100 Plays.[27][28]
In 2012, critic Benedict Nightingale included Top Girls in his list of Great Moments in the Theatre, writing that many of Churchill's plays "seize and startle, asking key questions in dramatically daring ways, but none more than that modern classic, Top Girls.[29]"
In 2013, Top Girls made Entertainment Weekly's list of the "50 Greatest Plays of the Past 100 Years".[2]
Also in 2013, Top Girls was featured in Lucy Kerbel's book of 100 Great Plays for Women. Kerbel had written the book in response to many of her theatre colleagues saying that "There just aren't any good plays for women". Kerbel stated that this phrase was often "delivered like a universal truth: no, with the exception of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, no one in the history of playwrighting had managed to deliver a single decent play that had more parts for women than men".[30]
In 2014, Top Girls was ranked by The Daily Telegraph as one of the 15 greatest plays ever written.[3]
In 2018, Top Girls was included in The Times's list of "The greatest plays of all time".[31]
In 2019 Methuen Drama conducted a public poll to decide which of their published plays should be re-issued as part of a special edition boxset that would commemorate 60 years of publishing play-texts in their Modern Plays series.[32] The poll consisted of a shortlist of Methuen’s plays for each decade since 1960, with voters being asked to determine which play was “the most representative” of the decade in which it premiered.[33] Out of a shortlist of nine plays from the 1980s Top Girls received the most votes. As a result, the play-text of Top Girls was re-issued as a limited-edition hardback with a foreword by Ann McFerran.[34]
Aleks Sierz in his review of the 2019 National Theatre revival of the play wrote that "[Caryl Churchill has] a back-catalogue [of plays] which is stuffed full of contemporary classics, and a handful of masterpieces... Top Girls, is her masterpiece of masterpieces. Yes, it’s that good. It proves, if proof were needed, that she is clearly the best living British playwright."[35]
