Did we really need a Shirley Valentine revival in 2025?

Dear members – The Everyman has just announced that due to overwhelming demand, it will be extending its run of Willy Russell's critically acclaimed Shirley Valentine. Originally scheduled through 29th March, the show is now on until Saturday 5th April, so you still have time to grab tickets if you haven't yet.

The one-woman play is now almost as old as its titular character, Shirley, a disillusioned housewife first brought to life in 1986. Here at Post HQ, we began to wonder: might this material be growing a little stale – in terms of both the play's style and its presentation of class, gender and relationships – or does it still have something to say to modern audiences, especially here in Liverpool? So we sent theatre critic Matt Barton to find out. That's below. But first, your Post briefing.

Your Post Briefing

A memorial playground honouring the victims of the Southport attack will now be built after a fundraiser met its £250,000 goal. The playground will be set up in Churchtown Primary School — where both Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, and Bebe King, six, attended — and will include a performance stage and a library in tribute to the two girls. Alice’s favourite teacher, Alan Bowen, told the BBC it was a “beautiful way to keep her spirit alive”, adding: “I can picture Alice on that playground’s stage, singing, twirling her hair, and leading everybody else.” “We are incredibly grateful to everyone who made this playground possible,” Bebe’s parents added. “To the school, the donors and the entire community, thank you for your generosity and kindness.”

Drag star The Vivienne died from a heart attack caused by taking the drug ketamine, their family has now revealed. James Lee Williams, better known by their drag name The Vivienne, was found dead at their home in Cheshire earlier this year. The performer had previously spoken publicly about their struggle with addiction, specifically to ketamine — a dissociative anaesthetic that can be taken recreationally. Simon Jones, The Vivienne’s manager and friend, said the family felt it was important to share the circumstances of their death, adding: "I hope by us releasing this information we can raise awareness about the dangers of ongoing ketamine usage and what it can do to your body."

And a series of projects to help reduce social isolation for people over 65 have been launched in Sefton. Over 1,000 people in the region are set to benefit from 13 new schemes, which include cookery classes, art therapy sessions and fitness sessions. The projects are funded by Sefton Council, with cabinet member for health and wellbeing Mhairi Doyle saying the activities are meant to be “enjoyable and fun" to promote inclusion and get older people active in their communities. Each session will take place at a location in the borough, including sessions specifically for men at Sean's Place in Bootle, and sessions designed for women at Swan Women's Centre in Litherland.

Undervalued, underappreciated, underestimated. This is Shirley Valentine the character – and, perhaps, Shirley Valentine the play. As the title suggests, Willy Russell’s one-woman play is all about her, and she is all we have. Over two hours of monologue, the middle-aged, working-class Liverpudlian housewife introduces us to a husband, kids, friends and acquaintances – but all are unseen. Can her life really be interesting enough to sustain a whole show? But that’s the point – the assumption of her unremarkable worth, which she sets out to defy.

The play begins with Shirley rustling up chips and egg for her sullen husband Joe’s dinner. It will prove a calamitous mistake. Tuesdays, he will remind her, are when he eats chips and egg; Thursdays are for steak. But she’s already fed the steak to the neighbour’s dog. Cue a meltdown, and Joe chucking the dinner down her clothes. Having previously scoffed at her friend’s invitation to join her on an impromptu getaway to Greece, she quickly reconsiders. And there’ll be much more reconsidering to follow when the trip throws her life into a new perspective.

Shirley is 42 years old; the play is now almost the same age. Willy Russell, one of Liverpool’s most famous playwrights, wrote it to celebrate the Everyman’s 21st birthday in 1986. It came on the back of his comic play Educating Rita – about another dissatisfied working-class Liverpudlian woman – and the tragic musical Blood Brothers. Noreen Kershaw originated the role, before Pauline Collins stepped into her shoes when the play opened in the West End two years later, where it won Olivier awards for best new comedy and best actress. 

Inevitably, then, a film followed in 1989, for which Collins returned. But it went down with critics like that plate of chips and egg with Joe. Critics faulted its “banality”, “artifice” and “staginess” in an object lesson of the perils of stage-to-screen adaptations. The slight hokeyness of Russell’s stage play seemed magnified on the big screen. The New York Times laid into what it called “hackneyed writing” with “simplistic slogans” and “one tired punch line on top of another”. Comparing the film to the play’s Broadway transfer, a critic wrote: “on screen the strength of [Collins’] performance is shattered by being chopped into discrete little bits”.

It’s fair to say one of the film’s flaws is it diluted the role of our heroine by sharing attention across the other characters, who are on-screen in the film as opposed off-stage and unheard in the play. As a result, it becomes overinsistent about the grimness of Shirley’s life, tipping into melodrama, when the play is about everyday frustrations mounting to trigger a major wake-up call. Instead of Shirley reporting Joe’s slights to us, with an occasional tongue-in-cheek quip, we have to watch her sit silently while being upbraided by him. But this story was never really about Joe and the other characters; it’s Shirley’s name in the title. The inclusion of these surrounding characters also exposed their two-dimensionality, used as various sticks with which to poke her, rather than existing as richly drawn people. Both a Time Out and Empire review accused the film of stereotyping, with the latter concluding: “you can’t help feeling you’ve seen and heard everything here somewhere before.”