Shirley Valentine
Fall in love with life on a baking hot Greek island with the woman who has had enough of being unappreciated.
“Don’t say maybe, maybe,” sang Natalie Bassingthwaighte on the track ‘Voodoo Child’, back in her Rogue Traders-fronting days.
It may as well be the catchcry of frustrated housewife Shirley Valentine, who experiences a never-too-old awakening on an idyllic Greek island holiday in Willy Russell’s beloved one-woman play. It was adapted into a big-screen adventure for stage star Pauline Collins, who shared the limelight with Joanna Lumley and Tom Conti.
Bassingthwaighte fronts this new staging at Melbourne’s grand old dame, the Athenaeum, as directed by theatrical wonderwoman Lee Lewis. She’s in good hands, with Lewis having run both Queensland Theatre and Sydney’s Griffin Theatre, where she helmed another smash hit solo show, Prima Facie.
An empowering tale for the ages, Shirley Valentine introduces us to the Liverpudlian who was breaking the fourth wall way before Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Literally. She’s so bored out of her mind looking after her lazy husband that she monologues at the kitchen wallpaper while fixing him chips and eggs for dinner. So when her best mate wins a trip for two to Greece, she thinks, ‘What the hell?’ and makes a break for the sun by her side.
But how easy is it to go home to a monotonous bloke’s crushing mundanity when you’ve fallen head over heels for the Mediterranean lifestyle, all fresh food and delicious wines by the sea...