THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Sheridan Smith has the kind of star wattage you don't see often. She bounds on stage, beams, and the audience opens up to her like a flower. She's simply perfect casting for this monologue about a working class Liverpool housewife and she pulls it off with great aplomb. Being a solo piece, and on the long side, it's not easy for an actor, but she drinks in the audience's energy. She's also blessed with comic timing which a stand-up would envy, and a great ear for mimicry - both essential for this piece.
She doesn't overpower the character either and, although she appears slightly more youthful than Pauline Collins' version, she totally convinces as the smart, vivacious, woman who's suffering the consequences of too much 'unused life' as she puts it.
At the time it was written, 1986, traipsing off to the Isles of Greece was beyond the horizons of most working-class women, even if they could work up the courage. Cheap flights and greater economic independence transformed all that, but you sense the male chauvinism of then hasn't changed much. Husband, Joe, prefers her at home and his dinner on table the minute he walks in the door of an evening. She taunts him with chips 'n egg on Thursday when everyone knows Thursday is always mince. So, in a sense, it's a period piece and Russell and director Mathew Dunster have cleverly kept it in its time. The film, which I caught recently, has certainly dated, especially in the treatment of the Greek locals but, by keeping this as her personal vision of the story, it manages to rise above that. She also displays a level of self-awareness which would impress a room full of psychiatrists and this is perhaps a rare flaw in the piece.
The play has resonance everywhere though and it was a universal hit precisely because it speaks to thwarted lives and being stuck in dead end job and living for those two weeks in the sun. Its saving grace is that it leavens its themes with great, caustic, humor. That characteristic Scouse wit (Irish roots of course) is exemplified in the little scenarios she recounts such the one about her little boy's Nativity play, where the determined lad took no nonsense from the Inn Keeper. Although she's not well traveled, she's streetwise, and has an innate ability to size people up quickly, like her awful neighbor Gillian - "Yeah, that's how she talks, she begrudges you the breath!".
The play is very much about class too and the awful snobbery of the schoolteachers who wrote off generations of bright girls like Shirley and in doing so deliberately hampered their chances. Her later reunion with the 'good girl' from school, who ended up a posh hooker, neatly skewers all of that.
Paul Wills' designs are spot-on, from Shirley's well-scrubbed kitchen to her respectable going away clothes, and Lucy Carter's lighting achieves most of the work in transporting us to a Greek Island beach – all light, warmth and possibility.
In the end she decides to settle on the island, working as a waitress "because I'd fallen in love with the idea of living". You'll fall in love with Shirley.
