Shirley Valentine Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh 13th June 2024 Review
Shirley Valentine is at the Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh until 29th June, and this presentation of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre production of Willy Russell’s classic play is pretty much perfect.
Set against a minimalist stage background of Shirley’s Kitchen for Act I and an even more minimalist representation of somewhere in Greece in Act II, this production leaves absolutely no hiding space for Sally Reid to be the Shirley Valentine that everyone in the audience expects to be there on stage.
To be honest, Sally Reid needs no hiding space anyhow and this always demanding monologue of a role for any performer is just a perfect example of how to pull your audience into your story, your world, and hold them there awaiting your next word. Performances like this one tonight are rare, and a script for any play as well crafted as this one is by Willy Russell is perhaps even rarer. When you give a performer of the calibre of Sally Reid a script of this quality (some would say magic), something special is always going to happen, and tonight on stage it did.
How did one man, Willy Russell, manage to create a woman like Shirley Valentine? Perhaps the answer to that question is best left unanswered and the mystery never solved. Somehow though the lost hopes and dreams, loss of identity, loss of choices and that feeling of settling for far less than you should do in life from not only those around you, but your own self that Shirley feels have resonated with so many women (and probably many men too) since this work first premiered in 1988.
Many people reading this review are possibly more familiar with the 1989 film starring Pauline Collins and there are obvious differences here on-stage, the monologue performance format being the most obvious of them. If you have not yet seen Shirley Valentine in her original home, on stage in a theatre, then try and get to this production as this is where the real power of Willy Russell’s words are and this is where Shirley, a middle aged woman from Liverpool, stuck in what seems an inescapable rut in her life, really lives. This is where Shirley shares her innermost feelings, her innermost frustrations, with an audience as she talks directly to them all through the show and this style of monologue writing creates a unique bond between the two. The only other confidant to Shirley’s feelings of being trapped in ever shrinking world of opportunities with no blue skies on the horizon is the wall of her kitchen.
To hold that illusion of Shirley Valentine becoming not only a real person on stage, but also I suspect to many people in the audience, a friend that they wish they knew, or even a reflection of their own self, takes a special performer on stage to do that, and Sally Reid just makes it all look so effortless.
One of the special qualities of Willy Russell’s script here is his ability to take Shirley and what seems her hopeless situation of entrapment and loss of self-identity and turn it into a declaration of self-rediscovery and the realisation that you can take back control of the choices in your life and regain not only that person that you lost a long time ago, but also your own identity and destiny.
This production of Shirley Valentine, directed by Elizabeth Newman, is very definitely a work that celebrates the strength of women and their right to make their own choices in life. It is though more than that, it is a beacon of hope for anyone that, for whatever reason, feels that they have somehow lost their own way in life, and if Shirley can regain all of these things, then perhaps they too can do the same!
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
Set against a minimalist stage background of Shirley’s Kitchen for Act I and an even more minimalist representation of somewhere in Greece in Act II, this production leaves absolutely no hiding space for Sally Reid to be the Shirley Valentine that everyone in the audience expects to be there on stage.
To be honest, Sally Reid needs no hiding space anyhow and this always demanding monologue of a role for any performer is just a perfect example of how to pull your audience into your story, your world, and hold them there awaiting your next word. Performances like this one tonight are rare, and a script for any play as well crafted as this one is by Willy Russell is perhaps even rarer. When you give a performer of the calibre of Sally Reid a script of this quality (some would say magic), something special is always going to happen, and tonight on stage it did.
How did one man, Willy Russell, manage to create a woman like Shirley Valentine? Perhaps the answer to that question is best left unanswered and the mystery never solved. Somehow though the lost hopes and dreams, loss of identity, loss of choices and that feeling of settling for far less than you should do in life from not only those around you, but your own self that Shirley feels have resonated with so many women (and probably many men too) since this work first premiered in 1988.
Many people reading this review are possibly more familiar with the 1989 film starring Pauline Collins and there are obvious differences here on-stage, the monologue performance format being the most obvious of them. If you have not yet seen Shirley Valentine in her original home, on stage in a theatre, then try and get to this production as this is where the real power of Willy Russell’s words are and this is where Shirley, a middle aged woman from Liverpool, stuck in what seems an inescapable rut in her life, really lives. This is where Shirley shares her innermost feelings, her innermost frustrations, with an audience as she talks directly to them all through the show and this style of monologue writing creates a unique bond between the two. The only other confidant to Shirley’s feelings of being trapped in ever shrinking world of opportunities with no blue skies on the horizon is the wall of her kitchen.
To hold that illusion of Shirley Valentine becoming not only a real person on stage, but also I suspect to many people in the audience, a friend that they wish they knew, or even a reflection of their own self, takes a special performer on stage to do that, and Sally Reid just makes it all look so effortless.
One of the special qualities of Willy Russell’s script here is his ability to take Shirley and what seems her hopeless situation of entrapment and loss of self-identity and turn it into a declaration of self-rediscovery and the realisation that you can take back control of the choices in your life and regain not only that person that you lost a long time ago, but also your own identity and destiny.
This production of Shirley Valentine, directed by Elizabeth Newman, is very definitely a work that celebrates the strength of women and their right to make their own choices in life. It is though more than that, it is a beacon of hope for anyone that, for whatever reason, feels that they have somehow lost their own way in life, and if Shirley can regain all of these things, then perhaps they too can do the same!
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com