FringeReview UK 2017

Shirley Valentine

Adam Spiegel

Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Mainstream Theatre, Solo Performance, Theatre

Venue: Theatre Royal, Brighton

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Glen Walford’s returned to direct the play she introduced back in 1986. Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine completes his 1980s triumvirate focusing on women with life-changing choices.

With Jodie Prenger in the title role as a one-person dynamo of discontent and reconnection, it’s heady, hearty, and heart-warming. This is by any standards a superb revival, and Prenger launches into comic stardom beyond her singing roles.

Prenger effortlessly transcends the very real deep fat fryer with real chips designer Amy Yardley provides in her first act verismo kitchen, late 1980s quite suburban, not shabby either. The second act’s rocks and turquoise sky as well as sand feel like a plastic dream: it’s a cartoon of what a Greek island might look like. Through a brief choreographed interlude by the way, ASMs nibble chips and with Prenger swig the leftover wine. James Whiteside’s lighting moves from neon to sun glare with Ed Clarke’s sound design rumbling quiet thunder.

So it’s ‘hello wall’ – and later ‘hello rock’ which being Greek Shirley reflects she can’t even translate – as Shirley née Valentine Bradshaw forty-two reflects on her lowering husband and dependant daughter. Only the son’s in on the fact that Jane, another needy friend has booked them both a Greek holiday. And Shirley’s given the husband’s steak to her vegan employers’ desperate dog.

The whole of the first act till the coda is timed to the husband’s imminent arrival, as Shirley reflects on the clitoris bus, the one she missed, her son Brian’s stubborn guying of the school Nativity as Joseph: ‘Joseph and Mary in hotel dispute’ headlines scream as aged six he destroys the play. Such incremental hilarity just underscores Shirley’s contention that her husband’s as stuck as her, and deviation would induce from him a speech ‘longer than the Gettysburg address.’ Recalling Shirley’s school report summarised in: ‘Shirley will not go far, a good thing considering her knowledge of geography’ there’s occasionally a disconnect between educated Rita-like metaphors and Shirley’s avowed ignorance. Prenger ensures it doesn’t matter, her character wobbling in doubt invoking ‘thighs like the Parthenon… tyre marks like the M6’.

So we’re treated to opposite responses: the daughter’s horror pursued by her mother’s hollering to her taxi: ‘sex and sand…. it’s the F plan’ and irritating neighbour Gillian whose gesture produces the first, miraculous volte-face of the play.

Shirley peels off more than expected, first her quondam feminist friend Jane picking up a red-eyed lover ‘all Adidas and groin’ leaving Shirley to the tender mercies of attentive waiter Costas, whose collection of Shirley – brushing past a returning Jane – is one of the ways Russell inverts expectation. Slighted Greeks – whom Shirley champions when companions forced on her become horribly British – have a way of using Mancunians’ words against them. So Greek boats ‘built by Noah’ get riposted by ‘a boat, steered by my brother Noah.’ As for Jane thinking this same Costas a cleaner he off-handedly returns the compliment.

The play allows us to register elements occasionally lost in the film. Being a one-woman performance it showcases Prenger’s range of accents, voices and comedies developed musically like motifs, and arced like a musical number. Above all her orchestration of risk, raunch and recovery comes like a peroration, an enormous yes as someone over in Hull once said. Prenger’s brought depth, perfect timing and the art of the comic pause, as her Christopher Columbus having discovered ‘the island of Clit-oris’ and fireworks is followed by ‘… what shit’. Prenger like Shirley Valentine is ready for anything now.

Published July 18, 2017 by Simon Jenner