Review: Shirley Valentine at the Liverpool Everyman *****

Four decades after she first slid chips and egg on to a plate, Shirley Valentine continues to speak directly to audiences all over the world.

We’re barely into 2025 and there has already been a run of the one-woman play in Melbourne while a special performance is due to take place in Istanbul tomorrow to mark International Women’s Day. Meanwhile Mina Anwar is currently on a UK tour with her own interpretation.

Global reach and theatrical longevity then for Willy Russell’s restless Liverpool housewife who seeks to rediscover the person who “got lost in all this unused life”.

But Shirley’s story started here on the Everyman’s stage, and there’s something extra special therefore about her (finally) returning to Hope Street, this new production part of the theatre’s 60th anniversary year.

If that creates an additional weight of expectation, it certainly doesn’t appear to have phased Liverpool actress Helen Carter who proves a luminous presence on the current theatre’s thrust stage.

Under Stephen Fletcher’s skilled direction, Carter relishes every one of Russell’s slyly funny streams of consciousness while also peeling back the layers to lay bare the play’s emotional heart in an expertly paced, tour-de-force performance full of warmth and wit, but also of real raw, visceral vulnerability.

There's plenty of bright chattiness in Russell's challenging monologue. But both Fletcher and Carter also recognise the power in its silences.

Meanwhile the playwright himself has apparently been an active and invaluable third member of this close-knit creative team from the production’s inception onwards (he was a low-key presence at the back of the stalls last night, as he has been through every preview apparently).

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Above and top: Helen Carter in Shirley Valentine. Photos by Andrew AB Photography.

For Russell’s Shirley Bradshaw, 42 is the conduit for reflecting on life and whether she even has one – or at least one outside the claustrophobic confines of her role as wife, mother, chief cook and bottlewasher. Where, she ponders as she peels and slices potatoes, folds washing and puts away groceries, did the daring and rebellious young Shirley Valentine go?

Technically, this is the theatrical equivalent of tapping your head and rubbing your tummy simultaneously. Emotionally, the perpetual motion is a successful displacement activity which allows Shirley to explore uncomfortable feelings in a subtle – and strangely, perhaps a more profound - way than simply sitting at a table and addressing her audience (like Snout in Pyramus and Thisbe, we are ‘wall’).

Earlier, Carter makes what can only be described as a rockstar entrance - followed by designer Katie Scott's kitchen set, with its working white goods, which glides smoothly into place behind her.

After the interval Greece is evoked more sparsely with 'rock' replacing 'wall', and a lone table, chairs and parasol in place of fitted cabinets and kitchen table. Here, it's Joshie Harriette's skilful lighting design which assists the narrative.

Russell's life-affirming story of liberation and transformation was a smash hit when it was first staged at the theatre back in March 1986.

And this latest reincarnation of Shirley Valentine deserves to be just as big a success....doesn't it, wall?