Shirley Valentine has become embedded in our language and culture thanks to Liverpudlian writer Willy Russell’s 1986 one woman play having been so successfully adapted to film, musical and radio over the years. Sally Reid, who received Outstanding Performance Award for her version of the eponymous character in 2022, has reprised her role in this production from Pitlochry Festival Theatre.
Sally steps in to the role as comfortably as her feet slip in to the slippers she wears in the first scene as she walks in to the set of the functioning kitchen where Shirley and her husband Joe had had so much daft fun painting in the early days of their now dull marriage. The colour of her plain pinkish top made her almost blend in to the background which is exactly what had happened to her. Sassy Shirley had become invisible in her own life with only the wall to talk to – not needed by her children and feeling like no more than head cook and bottle washer for her man, who’s become more cemented than set in his ways. Thursday night is mince night so her option of egg and chips doesn’t go down well.
An offer from her pal Jane to go to Greece for a fortnight ignites memories of who she used to be. The gum chewing gallus lassie who was brave enough to jump off a roof yet listened to her headmistress’s negativity and missed her potential meets her clever school mate Marjorie by chance and is completely disabused to learn that her wealth and status comes from being a high class hooker and not an air hostess. Yet the ‘sweetest kiss’ she gives Shirley marks the sadness of a lost friendship.
Sally takes us through this intimate story with great warmth and honesty, delivering Russell’s dry witty lines as if they were her very own. Throughout a tremendous feat of memory Sally shifts with consummate ease from a Liverpudlian accent to ones that elocution had eradicated then to the Mancunian Brits abroad who ‘rescue’ her from a solitary dining table giving her the classic line “I wish I’d ordered the soup. I could’ve put me face in it.”
With sand and sea shown in sparkling blue and gold cubes from designer Emily James, Shirely is found alone speaking to the rocks as her pal Jane has found better things to do. But she meets the Greek bar owner Costas, who she knows is ‘full of s**t’ but is a man who, maybe thanks to Willy Russell’s time working as a ladies hairdresser, knows how to listen to women. Shirley isn’t ‘loop de loop’ enough to fall for him, but instead falls back in love with her old self and the idea of living.
Under Elizabeth Newman’s judicious direction, and with suitable anticipatory music, this production is an insightful sympathetic exposé of the shrinking life of a woman and a transformative moment in her life. Heartwarming and heart wrenching in equal measure, Sally Reid’s rivetingly good performance brings Russell’s empathic script, that’s crammed with wit and poignancy, to believable life making the show’s experience both emotional and affirmative. Brava!
Lyceum dates: 12th to 29th June 2024
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 