Shirley Valentine

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

To miss Pam Clifton as Shirley Valentine at the Playwright Theatre is to simply miss a gift of rich humanity, pointing toward reinvention and being alive.

The play is chockfull of memorable quotes. One of the most striking, “Most of us die long before we’re dead.” This, out of the mouth of a dowdy, bored, and stagnant Liverpool housewife who talks to the kitchen walls while cooking her husband’s dinner of chips ’n’ eggs.

Actually, it is out of the mind of playwright Willy Russell who was commissioned to write the play for the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, premiering in 1986.

To pull this play off with strength and power requires an actor to maintain a natural demeanor talking to the walls outfitted in total believability. Clifton does this with great ease, even capturing the dowdiness that takes some artistic make-up work. The British accent flows with such naturalness she owns it. She owns Shirley. No sign of Clifton peeks around any corners, maintaining total consistency.

Married to Joe Bradshaw with two grown children, Shirley begins to wonder what happened to the person she use to be, Shirley Valentine. Where did she go? When did she go?

When her friend Jane wins a trip to Greece for two inviting Shirley along. Shirley bounces off and into the walls a long string of excuses why she can’t go. “Jane became a feminist when she found her husband in bed with the milkman”. Shirley notices Jane stopped taking milk in her tea. Some of Russell’s jokes in the writing could easily be placed into the trite basket, except Clifton’s down-to-earth Shirley treats them as her very own.

Candid, honest, introspective, the audience can’t help but feel they are secretly peeking into Shirley’s kitchen window. Shirley won’t notice. She’s too wrapped up in her humdrum world.

“Marriage”, she muses, “is like the Middle East, there’s no solution.”

Directed by Mollie Monk, the monologue comes alive with Act I taking place in Shirley’s kitchen. Clifton moves naturally while peeling potatoes at the kitchen table, cooks at the stove, and pours herself a glass of wine.

There is no sense whatsoever of listening to a monologue. The pictures and portraits she paints with colorful words allows the mind to see Joe, her daughter, Milandra, her son Brian, and her nosey next door neighbor who she thinks sees her the way she does bored and stagnant.

There’s pain of having lost herself, laced with rich creamy humor, and poignant insight allowing and tempting men to identify with Shirley as much as women.

She muses openly about sex and having never heard of the clitoris until relatively recently. Boldly, she claims Freud is at fault by giving out wrong information “just like they did with spinach.“

She talks about the Bloodhound she gave meat to, meant for her husband. The owners insist the dog is a vegetarian. Shirley doesn’t believe them. How can a Bloodhound be a vegetarian?

She remembers with affection the experience of her son, Brian, as a child playing Joseph in a Nativity play deciding at the last minute the part is too small. During the performance he takes it upon himself to embellish it, bringing his acting career to an immediate halt.

In elementary school she wanted to be like Majorie Majors. Running into Marjorie years later she learns Marjorie all through school wanted to be like Shirley.

As a girl she use to jump off the roof for fun. “Now I get vertigo standing on the pavement.”

Her vivid imagination prods her into pretending her kitchen is Greece. She longs to “drink a glass of wine in the country where grapes are grown”, even though she fears the world beyond those kitchen walls. She sees it, smells the sea air, and absorbs the blue skies. Through Clifton’s Valentine eyes, you see what she sees, smells what she smells, hear what she hears.

With bags packed, Shirley apologizes for not telling her husband she’s going. No problem she’ll leave him a note, “Gone to Greece. Back in two weeks.”

On a lingerie-buying splurge she runs into her neighbor, explaining so the walls understand, “If you have a headache, she has a brain tumor”. Even for Shirley, coming to conclusions can be wrong, and her neighbor knocks her socks off.

The set change from Shirley’s kitchen to Greece becomes a matter of creative simplicity.

Comfortable talking to the kitchen walls, Shirley falls comfortably into talking to a rock laying next to her beach chair. In a huge hat, a silk robe, and brightly printed skirt, she finds herself alone on the beach. She and Jane planned on doing everything together. However, Jane met a man and didn’t come back for four days.

Now she’s a woman alone, a woman couples feel they need to rescue into the complaining world of “The sun is too hot. The sea too wet, and Greece too Greek”. Going through the various moods, Clifton allows the audience to live vicariously along with Shirley. Expressing her lostness, she senses her life “becomes a crime against God for not living a full life.”

There is a man reveling in dishing out the romantic bull to female vacationers, Shirley hears him from the depth of a deep-dish casserole, instead of the superficial level of a pie plate. As Clifton’s mind twirls with Shirley, she begins to ponder, “what if she didn’t go back? That women’s job is done.” No she isn’t in love with the Casanova Costas, She’s in love with life. If she goes back, she will be the wife, the mother, talking to the kitchen wall, cooking chips ’n’ egg, being taken for granted.

Shirley Valentine brings alive a modern day Everyman scenario. No, the message is not to run off to Greece leaving only a note. The message is simply to ask the right questions as freely and as openly as Shirley does with eyes wide open.

Clifton combines warm energy with discontented charm; a magician creating a timid illusion until through the illusion reality grows a voice.

Because she actually cooks on stage, don’t go hungry, you’ll be wanting Shirley to serve you even if it is chips ’n’ eggs.

If, when you call for reservations, you get a generic woman announcing you have reached 303-499-0803, it is indeed the Playwright Theatre. Their answering machine chooses to play games. It undoubtedly heard Clifton as Shirley Valentine, and periodically runs off to Greece to breathe sea air, gawk at Costas, and “to drink a glass of wine in the land grapes are grown”. Sometimes the Playwright information is there. Sometimes it is not. Leave your information no matter who answers. You haven’t reached a wrong number.

Thoughtful, provocative, funny, poignant, endearing, every class in Women’s Studies should make Clifton’s production a class requirement. Actually, it should be a requirement for everyone who wants to feel welcome into the human race. Forget the “should’s.” Just go.