Shirley Valentine
“I wrote the line ‘I like a glass of wine when I’m doin’ the cooking” Then Shirley turned around and glancing at it, said “Don’t I, wall?” At that moment the play was born.”
Shirley:
“Y’know I like a glass of wine when I’m doin’ the cookin’. Don’t I wall? Don’t I like a glass of wine when I’m preparing the evenin’ meal. Chips an’ egg! I never used to drink wine. It was our Millandra who started me on the this. She said to me, she said ‘Mother! Mother, nobody drinks rum an’ coke these days. Everybody drinks wine now. Oh Mother have a glass of Riesling instead. ‘Kids they know everything don’t they?”
Awards
London - 1988
Laurence Olivier Award, Best Actress - Pauline Collins
Laurence Olivier Award, Best New Comedy - Shirley Valentine
New York - 1989
Tony Award, Best Actress - Pauline Collins
“When I was writing Shirley I found myself thinking in her voice, speaking in her voice and having access to the wit which she – unlike me – naturally has. It wasn’t done consciously on my part but, like the kind of film actor who remains in character for the duration of a shoot, I began to ‘live’ Shirley, seeing the world as she would, inwardly noting and commenting as she would and in her voice. And I discovered that on those occasions when I had to drop ‘being’ Shirley, when I had to focus on other things and give my attention to other matters it would take me days to get her back and I’d go through hellish panics because I couldn’t bring her back.
Once I realised that by letting her go, by switching off from Shirley for a while, I made it so much more difficult for myself to start again, so I just completely held onto her. I saw the world in terms of Shirley Valentine, so I’d be out shopping or across at my neighbours having a word with them about something and I’d say things and they’d be falling about. Because it would be Shirley Valentine talking – not me! And I wasn’t doing it in a cynical way, to try out stuff so that I could write it into the play the next day. I just found that it was so much better for the writing process if I carried on ‘being’ Shirley. It’s why I think of Shirley Valentine as a play that was performed into being as much as it was written.”
Original Production
The Everyman Theatre, Liverpool. 1986
Producer - The Everyman Theatre, Liverpool
Director - Glen Walford
Cast
Shirley Valentine - Noreen Kershaw
‘Understudy’ - Willy Russell
“On reflection I find it hard to fathom how someone as superstitious as myself could have agreed that in the event of Noreen ever being off, I would go on and read the text. BUT:
A few weeks into the run Noreen is whisked off to hospital with severe stomach pains. At about four pm I get a call from director Glen Walford saying that they're keeping Noreen in overnight and so would I get myself over to the theatre and stand in for that night’s performance? Well, it had all seemed perfectly feasible all those nights before when the wine had had its silken fingers down my throat. But late on a sober Thursday afternoon, the play a big hit and Noreen rightly lauded for her fine performance, that evening's performance, like all the others, completely sold out - the idea of me standing there on stage and just giving a reading of the play now seemed woefully less than the brilliant idea it had once been. With no alternative however…
And then, the next day, we heard that Noreen's stomach pains had been the pains of peritonitis and she’d not be able to resume the part for the extended three weeks of the run that had just been announced. So that was how I came to do my Shirley Valentine night after night. It became this bizarre theatrical event and I was going on every night playing to packed houses and just asking them to believe that this six foot, bearded male was a forty two year old woman.”
At the end of that year, in the Daily Post and Echo Annual Arts Awards Noreen won the Award For Best Actress. 'And I won For Best Supporting Actress!”
Vaudeville Theatre, The Strand, London. 1988
Producer - Bob Swash
Director - Simon Callow
Cast
Shirley Valentine - Pauline Collins
Broadway, The Booth Theatre, NYC. 1989
Producer - Bob Swash/The Really Useful Theatre Company
Director - Simon Callow
Cast
Shirley Valentine - Pauline Collins
Cast Changes
Ellen Burstyn (17th July - 25th November 1989)
National US Tour. 1995
Director - Simon Callow
Shirley Valentine - Loretta Swit
Canada /Hawaii Tour. 1995
Director - Simon Callow
Shirley Valentine - Loretta Swit
Menier Chocolate Factory, London. 2010
Producer - David Babani for Chocolate Factory Productions
Director - Glen Walford
Cast
Shirley Valentine - Meera Syal
Trafalgar Studios, London. 2010
Transfer from The Menier Chocolate Factory
Producer - David Babani for Chocolate Factory Productions & Sonia Friedman Productions, Tanya Link, Bob Bartner & Bob Boyet
Director - Glen Walford
Cast
Shirley Valentine - Meera Syal
“Almost 30 years after its Liverpool premiere, there is, it has to be said, something almost unbelievable about Russell's account of a bright, dynamic woman who has somehow become such a taken-for-granted wife and mother - no job, no other identity - that she simply puts up with a bullying husband who barely gives her the time of day . . . this image of a female life still seems to strike a huge chord with generations of women who find themselves infinitely relied on for the practicalities of domestic life, but barely noticed as people… [on Shirley:] a character whose very existence has been changing ordinary women's lives, ever since she first appeared.”
The Scotsman
30th Anniversary UK National Tour. 2017
Producer - Adam Spiegel
Director - Glen Walford
Cast
Shirley Valentine - Jodie Prenger
The Duke of Yorks Theatre,
St Martin’s Lane, London 2023
Producer - David Pugh
Director - Matthew Dunster
Cast
Shirley Valentine - Sheridan Smith
“Sheridan Smith and Shirley Valentine: it’s a match made in theatre heaven. Willy Russell’s 1986 one-woman play is a beloved British classic; Smith is a national treasure. It sounds like it should work, and it really, really does….Russell’s warm, wistful play about a fortysomething Liverpudlian housewife who dreams of travelling the world is a proven crowd-pleaser… Shirley is easy to love, meeting life’s disappointments with wise cracks and funny stories… But the part proves to be the perfect showcase for Smith’s talents, marrying her knack for nuance with her relish for a funny line, all threaded through with her innate likability. It’s an early contender for the best performance of the year… Russell captures something painfully authentic and moving in his portrait of a woman who has become so ignored that she’s lost all self-consciousness, nattering away even if no one is listening.”
The Independent
“Russell is so good at striking a balance between tenderly chronicling working-class lives and gently suggesting that these people’s hunger for something more, something greater. In his 1980 play Educating Rita, it’s knowledge, and in Shirley Valentine it’s the thrill of another country, a sun-drenched world of sexual and social possibilities.”
Financial Times
Since its original Liverpool Everyman production in1986, Shirley Valentine continues to be widely produced throughout the world. Although beyond the scope of this website to feature and credit every one of those productions, see below for images and posters generated by some of those versions. For further information on these and other productions the Willy Russell Archive at Liverpool John Moores Special Collections and Archive is an invaluable ressource.
