Shaw Festival’s Top Girls' real tour-de-force is its final scene

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Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, currently on at the Shaw Festival, is best known for its audacious opening scene – but it's the British play's final scene that really packs a wallop, equal to any in 20th century drama.

The 1982 masterpiece begins with a celebrated surreal sequence where Marlene (Fiona Byrne) marks a promotion at the Top Girls Employment Agency by hosting a dinner in her own honour.

Who would you invite as your guests if you could have any five people – living, dead or fictional – to dinner?

Marlene chooses Isabella Bird (Catherine McGregor), a 19th century English explorer; Lady Nijo (Julia Course), a Japanese emperor's courtesan and Buddhist nun from the 13th century; and Pope Joan (Claire Jullien), who, disguised as a man, is believed to have briefly been Pope in the 9th century.

The other two guests are Dull Gret (Laurie Paton), who appears in a painting by Brueghel, fighting devils in hell, and Patient Griselda (Tara Rosling), an impossibly obedient wife from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Marlene and this fantastic five chit-chat about their successes and struggles as women - but the party gradually goes off the rails as the wine bottles pile up and feelings get messy. It's a marvellously mad scene written more like music than drama, full of overlapping dialogue and recurring themes.

In my estimation, however, Top Girls' real tour-de-force is its final scene. Set a year earlier, it sees Marlene, a single, Thatcher-voting career woman living in London, face off against her sister Joyce (Tara Rosling), a cleaning woman and single mother, during a visit back home.

Drinking tea and then whisky, the sisters get personal about the political and vice-versa as they argue over whether Marlene has escaped a dismal youth and a dead-end town – or abandoned her family and her working-class roots.

Abortions, miscarriages, marriages and breakups all become weapons to be used in a battle of ideas and emotions that is as intellectually thrilling as it is moving. Byrne is brilliant here as Marlene, swinging from self-pitying to self-righteous, likeable to unsympathetic, almost from moment to moment.

All the while, teenager Angie (also played by Julia Course) listens in from the bedroom – learning family secrets along with the audience.

Churchill demonstrates her ability to knock a kitchen-sink drama out of the park in this scene – but the enduringly exciting British playwright always been more concerned about finding the right form for the right story.

Top Girls' unusual structure – the two major scenes bookend a series of minor ones set among the women at Marlene's workplace – can be off-putting. Director Vikki Anderson's production doesn't help the audience find the writing's rhythm in part because she's chosen a single intermission instead of two (a not unusual choice, alas) – and in part because of the puzzling style she's imposed on the play's transitions.

Before the show begins, Anderson has the cast put on their makeup, costumes and '80s wigs on stage behind a set of rolling vanities that make up Sue LePage's set while thematically appropriate period hits roll. (Money by The Flying Lizards; Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by The Eurythmics.)

But, oddly, the seven female actors don't acknowledge the presence of the audience while they do this – and affect an highly artificial attitude full of fake laughs and and high fives. This resumes in between scenes and leads to a choreographed curtain call. All very off-putting and mood puncturing.

More problematic are the uneven performances – and a pervading sense that many of the actors are mildly miscast.

Course's troubled Angie never seems like she could actually kill her mother, for example – a threat that should, at least, seem plausible – while Rosling's sophisticated, soft Joyce, costumed in an elegant cardigan, doesn't seem like she's ever spent a day cleaning houses.

Likewise, in the opening scene, only Paton and Jullien really feel like they've wandered in from another era; the rest of the dinner party has a gentility to it that suggests a fancy dress party rather than the metaphysical.

These company members, whom regular Shaw Festival audiences have seen play upper-class, repressed characters from a century ago with ease, seem less comfortable playing characters that are working-class, uninhibited and relatively contemporary.

After Byrne, the stand-out is Tess Benger – who plays Angie's young friend Kit with an exuberant, full-on physicality. She seems entirely in her body, too, as a waitress smoking in the background in the first scene.

The impression left is that Benger, in only her second season at the Shaw Festival, is better suited for the material as she has yet to absorb the old Shaw house style of acting – the "manner of the mandate" mannerisms from when the festival mostly did British plays from George Bernard Shaw's lifetime.

To an audience member that doesn't have a great production or two of Top Girls in their head, however, the Shaw Festival's production will be worth a visit. Its stylistic muscle-flexing and frankness apparently still retains the power to shock, as evidenced by the rows of spectators who left the opening-night performance.

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