Shirley Valentine is Willy Russell’s one-woman play of a bored and neglected Liverpudlian housewife (Claire Sweeney) reflecting on her dreary repetitive life and escaping to Greece when the opportunity comes her way.

Being a one-hander, the success of the drama rests on Claire Sweeney keeping the audience rapt throughout and this she certainly manages. Willy Russell’s scripts are of course renowned for capturing the humour of everyday life, the frustrations of class, and the rhythm of speech and nattering. Combining this with Sweeney’s ebullient and inviting demeanour, she strikes up a rapport easily with the audience.

The best elements of Shirley Valentine are the scenes that Shirley recounts, recollections which demonstrate her everyday life and capture the emotional strain of dissatisfaction affecting her and many of those round her. There’s a commonality to her experience that speaks to many people. You couldn’t accuse the play of hidden depths – the inner meaning to the piece is extolled explicitly – but that doesn’t mean its message of self-realisation and purposeful pursuit of happiness isn’t strong or well-told. Whilst light on subtext, the text itself is solid.

An element that I did find weaker was the set. Whilst certainly not dysfunctional in conveying the location of the two halves of the play – a kitchen and a Greek beach, respectively – the sets were stagey and bland. Shirley’s kitchen, for example, does convey a humdrum existence with its fitted cabinets and unadorned set-up but everything looks newly installed and not lived in. The flat lighting adds no texture to the environment too. The visual language is more like a showroom in Ikea than an evocative location. As much, if not more, could have been achieved with a few props floating in the stage space, since Shirley’s interaction with the location is relatively minimal. The audience’s imagination could paint the scenes in more vivid tones. In fact, that is precisely the case with the encounters Shirley reports from her life in Liverpool or escapades in Greece that make up so much of the play: they are drawn far more richly in words than the set can muster with its presence.

The core of Shirley Valentine, with its script and Sweeney’s performance, carries the show. My reservations about the set design aside, most who attend will find this funny and engaging with a simple and sincere moral to the story, which hopefully some of us will be able to take to heart.    ★★★☆☆     Fenton Coulthurst   19^th February 2020