Rediscovering the self you’ve lost (with sun and sea): Shirley Valentine at the Mayfield, a review

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

At the Mayfield, you have a chance to see a vintage show get a new lease on life — just like its heroine. 

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Shirley Valentine, a 1986 solo play by the Liverpool playwright Willy Russell, is one of theatre’s perennially affecting lost-and-found stories. As you’ll appreciate in Stephanie  Wolfe’s engaging, funny, touching solo performance, what Shirley at 52 has lost is … herself, the Shirley Valentine who dreamed and felt joy in life’s possibilities. And that’s what she finds — buried under layers of carrying on, sucking-it-up and making-do — on a life-changing trip to Greece.

Shirley Bradshaw née Valentine is a Liverpool housewife and mom whose life is so flattened by routine and the expectations of hubby Joe and grown-up kids that cooking up eggs and chips for dinner on a Thursday instead of the usual steak counts as radical. She’s so starved for human connection she talks to the wall. Which rather neatly solves the problem of many a solo show: why is the character onstage talking out loud to everyone, or no one?

Why doesn’t she leave? “I don’t know,” Shirley says flatly to the wall, like many fourth walls a better listener than conversationalist.

A lot has happened in the world of marriage and man-woman relationships since 1986. And, to be sure, a lot hasn’t. But Russell’s play isn’t really about that (thankfully, since Russell’s play would otherwise be having a mid-life crisis of its own). As Kate Ryan’s production and Wolfe’s warm and thoughtful performance give you to understand, it’s about re-discovering a sense of possibility in life, retrieving it from the anesthetizing effects of time.

When Shirley’s friend Jane invites her on a two-week trip to Greece, the idea is outlandish to her. But she does admit to a a touchingly modest dream: “drinking a glass of wine in the country where the grape is grown.” How can that be too much to ask?

I have to admit It took me a while to get into Shirley Valentine this time; I wondered if it was starting to show its age. In Act I, a kind of catalogue of the odds stacked against our heroine, Shirley relies for her unfailing good humour on self-mocking oldies and throw-aways that are more than a bit tired. Example: sex, she says, “is like Harrod’s. Over-rated.” Her observations, which she means to be funny, are a bit dusty. “I don’t hate men,” she declares. “I’m not a feminist!”

But gradually, I found myself won over, drawn by Wolfe’s charm into Shirley’s world, and the sudden cracks in the four-square solid architecture of her life. Wolfe, who’s adept at the Liverpool cadence with its distinctive upturns and inconclusive downbeat punchlines, takes a certain vintage quality into account as part of what another decade (or two) would gracelessly call “coping mechanisms.”

At some level, her little amused laughs that punctuate every observation are tinged ever so slightly by apology. Shirley, in Wolfe’s clever performance, knows she’s a bit passé, a heroine in a 40-year-old play, stuck in time. We feel for her; we share her insecurities.

Stephanie Wolfe in Shirley Valentine, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Which makes the transformation of Act II so splendid, captured by the golden glow of Trent Crosby’s lighting that takes Greek dawns into magical starry dusks. “Why do you get all this life if it can’t be used?” she asks, wonderstruck by beauty and ease instead of trying to find the funny side of low self-esteem. There’s a kind of revelation, as Wolfe conveys so affectingly, in Shirley’s regret that she’s been wasting so much of a limited supply of time and life — before she thinks again, that it’s not so much what’s been lost as what’s still to be found.

An evening with Shirley in her kitchen and then on the edge of the bright blue sea in Greece has a thoroughly enjoyable zen loveliness about it. It’ll make you take a deep breath and relax; it’ll touch your heart, and think about exactly what to do with your air miles. Doesn’t everyone have an inner Shirley Valentine waiting to be released?

REVIEW

Shirley Valentine

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Willy Russell

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Stephanie Wolfe

Running: through July 20

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca