Willy Russell’s 1986 monologue was a forerunner to the Thelma and Louise era of women who find a second lease of life in middle age. Almost four decades on, its portrait of a Liverpudlian housewife’s transformational trip to the Greek island of her dreams could so easily feel dated.
What is striking about Matthew Dunster’s production is that it leans into the sense of a bygone time and is deceptively passé at the start. There are references to the Milk Tray Man, the drachma and the EEC. Jane, who invites Shirley (Sheridan Smith) on a holiday to Crete, is branded a feminist because she has divorced her husband. Paul Wills’s 80s kitchen set mirrors the pastel colour scheme of Shirley’s mint trousers and pink bat-winged top.
It looks like a poundshop Alan Bennett as Shirley giggles conspiratorially with her glass of wine and talks to herself – and to her kitchen wall. The comedy is of the Saturday night kind with lukewarm, slightly predictable punchlines. She tells us marriage is like the Middle East (“there’s no solution”) and that sex is like going to the supermarket because after all the pushing and shoving you come out with very little.
The light and froth is a cunning trick, the play’s core crisis revealing itself in measures. When it does, it feels real and painful. The deeper, existential elements are powered by Smith’s disarming and quietly dazzling performance. She mines every ounce of cheeky comedy but also builds such surreptitious and organic emotional undercurrents that we buy every moment, and the play is eternally relevant.
Shirley is a woman so lonely she has taken to talking to a wall; a wife and mother who has lost her identity in dutifulness, and a pragmatist who long ago learned to turn her life’s disappointments into jokes.
Slowly the play reveals itself to be about identity, ageing, how we betray our own dreams and become people we don’t recognise, and how we tolerate unhappiness for fear of the unknown.
Russell’s script shows a deep and compassionate understanding of a certain kind of working-class woman at a certain age (though 42 seems rather premature for a midlife crisis now). She is judged not only by the men around her but women too – positively at times – though her daughter tells her that two middle-aged women going to Greece is “disgusting”.
In the second act, Wills’s set now a gorgeous abstraction of glowing pink and blue skies, Shirley’s feelgood message to value every minute of life does not sound mawkish when delivered by Smith. Shirley decides to have a bigger, fuller life and reminds us to do so too. Yes, it is too light and romantic a picture of midlife liberation but it gives us the shivers nonetheless.
Like Russell’s play Educating Rita, this is a work we know better through film, but Smith brings its heart and soul back to the theatre.
At the Duke of York’s theatre, London, until 3 June
