Shirley Valentine
The Duke of York’s Theatre | ★★★★✩
To the spit, crackle and sizzle of frying eggs and chips, Sheridan Smith’s Shirley Valentine holds court, surrounded by Formica cabinets and the kitchen walls that help to keep her life small.
The décor is very 1986, the year Willy Russell’s one-woman play opened at Liverpool’s Everyman before becoming a West End hit and almost as big a phenomenon as his earlier play Educating Rita.
Shirley is what Rita would have become without that education. The egg and chips are being cooked for her (unseen) husband Joe, who is expecting mince because it is Thursday.
However, Shirley couldn’t stop herself giving it to a neighbour’s bloodhound whose vegetarian owners keep the dog on a strictly no-meat diet. There will be hell to pay. Not from the dog’s owners but from Joe.
In other hands this fizzing monologue might have been pure kitchen-sink drama. But at heart Russell is a comedy writer down to his funny bone and in Shirley he created — or reflected — a northern woman who is clever, funny, and though brimful of regret has not a drop of self pity.
This Scouse spouse’s two children — “our Millandra” and “our Brian”, an angry working-class poet who, to Shirley’s relief, has given up archery — have both flown the nest, leaving Shirley locked into the rhythms of a loveless marriage.
Smith in the title role (Photo: John Wilson)
At 42, serving egg and chips on a Thursday is the most adventurous thing she has done in years. Yet plane tickets to Greece from a friend have reawakened the fun- loving Shirley Valentine of old who once jumped off a roof and who now yearns to drink wine in the country that grew the grapes it was made from.
The will-she-or-won’t-she question hovering over act one is answered in act two when the curtain in Matthew Dunster’s production rises on a vast turquoise sky underneath which Shirley has found her favourite spot on the beach ,“alone, but not lonely”.
The audience cheers at this moment of liberation. Smith surfs the reaction like a seasoned stand-up.
The Scouse accent and comic timing are impeccable but what elevates the performance are the moments of mimicry when portraying the annoying people in Shirley’s life: her whiny daughter; snobby Gillian next door and her fellow English holidaymakers, who complain that everything in Greece is Greek.
The play feels a little dated in an era in which cheap flights, though apparently on the way out, are still most people’s experience.
But there are still plenty of lives yearning to be let out and lived to the full, and the reminder that we have the choice to free ourselves from the expectations imposed on us by others will never go out of fashion.
