Produced by The Public Theatre
 January, 1997

 A Study Guide
 Prepared by
 Martin Andrucki
 Professor of Theater, Bates College

The Public Theatre and Professor Martin Andrucki
own all rights to this Study Guide.
 

I. THE AUTHOR

Willy Russell was born to a working-class family in a small town just outside of Liverpool, England in 1947.

Liverpool and its environs--a region of factories and bleak urban landscapes--constitute England's second-largest metropolitan area.  A center of shipping and manufacturing, Liverpool since the end of the Second World War has experienced economic stagnation and social decline.  The city became known to the world during the 1960s as the home of The Beatles, whose wisecracking effrontery and ironic, often cynical sense of humor were regarded as typical of the disillusioned--and sometimes despairing--outlook of Liverpool's working classes.

Willy Russell's work as a writer has been profoundly influenced by these regional circumstances and attitudes.  Although not an outstanding student, Russell developed an early love of reading, and fantasized about becoming a writer.  He describes this longing as, a wonderful and terrible thought--wonderful because I sensed, I knew, it was the only thing for me.  Terrible because how could I, a kid from the 'D' stream, a piece of factory fodder, ever change the course that my life was already set upon?  How the hell could I ever be the sort of person who could become a writer?  It was a shocking and ludicrous thought, one that I hid deep in myself for years, but one that would not go away.

From the outset, then, Russell felt that the social world into which he was born was fundamentally opposed to his deepest desires.  Hiding his yearning to write, Russell managed only a mediocre academic career in primary and secondary schools, and after failing the entrance exam for an apprenticeship as a printer, his family decided he should become a ladies' hairdresser, a career he followed from age sixteen to twenty-two.  After six years of a job he "didn't understand and didn't like," Russell finally began to write--an activity he squeezed in between hairdressing appointments.  Eventually he realized that, if ever I was to become a writer I had first to get myself into the sort of world which allowed for, possibly even encouraged such aspiration.  But that would mean a drastic change of course.  Could I do it?  Could I do something which those around me didn't understand?  I would have to break away.

Which he did by enrolling in a night course in English literature.  After this taste of serious learning, Russell decided he must attend college full-time.  However, he lacked the money to pay the tuition.  The only way to get it was by taking a job at a factory "cleaning oil from the girders high above the machinery.  With no safety equipment whatsoever and with oil on every girder the danger was obvious.  But the money was big."  After saving enough to pay for college, Russell quit the factory, and enrolled in school.  As he says of his first day of classes,

The obvious difference between me and the sixteen-year-olds pouring down the drive made me feel exposed and nervous but as I entered the glass doors of Childwall College I felt as if I'd made it back to he beginning.  I could start again.  I felt at home.

In addition to writing for the stage, Russell has also produced screenplays for three of his plays, including Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine.   He is also a singer-songwriter, having performed for more than twenty years with a group known as Kirbytown Three.  And he composed both the lyrics and music for Blood Brothers.

About his dramas of escape and self-discovery, Russell has said,

every play I have ever written has, ultimately, been one which celebrates the goodness of man. . . . It is the goodness that I hope the audience is left with.  I really don't want to write plays that are resigned, menopausal, despairing. . . .  I don't want to use any medium as a platform for displaying the smallness and hopelessness of man.  Man is man because madly, possibly stupidly but certainly wonderfully, he kicks against the inevitability of life.

II. THE PLOT

Shirley Valentine is a one-woman play whose action unfolds over the course of three separate scenes set on three different days.  The first two scenes, which comprise Act I, are three weeks apart.  The third, which constitutes Act II, takes place a few months later.  In each scene Shirley addresses the audience as if they were old friends, relishing the story of her changing life.

In Act I, Shirley must decide whether to accept an invitation from her friend, Jane, to spend two weeks, at no cost, in Greece.  During the first scene of Act I, Shirley ponders the pros and cons of the invitation.  On the one hand, she says she would "like to drink a glass of wine in a country where the grape is grown.  Sittin' by the sea.  Lookin' at the sun."  This longing is all the more urgent because, at age 42, after decades of marriage to her husband, Joe, and after raising two children, Shirley feels that her life has become dull and meaningless, and that she has somehow lost her true self:

What happened?  Who turned me into this?  I don't want this.  Do you remember. . . . Shirley Valentine?  She got married to a boy called Joe an' one day she came to live here. . . .  They got married, they made a home, they had kids. . . .  And somewhere along the way the boy called Joe turned into "him" and Shirley Valentine turned into this. . . .  I can't remember . . . when it happened.  When it stopped bein' good.  When Shirley Valentine disappeared, became just another name on the missin' persons' list.

I don't know why I stay. . . .  But I've been talkin' to the wall for more years than I care to remember now.  An' I'm frightened.  I'm frightened of the life beyond the wall.

Well, that's when I started laughin'.  I ended up . . . I ended up rollin' on the kitchen floor. . . . But I couldn't stop laughin' because I knew then.  I knew I was gonna do it.  I knew I was gonna go to Greece.

Act II finds Shirley in Greece, a suntanned figure inhabiting a beach just outside a picturesque town.  As she recounts her experiences since leaving England, we gradually grasp that she has long outstayed her original two weeks vacation.  We learn that she has met and had an affair with a Greek waiter, Costas, that she has taken a job as a waitress at a local taverna, and that she is planning to stay on indefinitely.  She has come to realize the tragedy of her "unused life," and has resolved to make the most of the future.  She has even informed Joe of her transformation, and has told him that her most important "holiday romance . . . is with meself."  As a result, she is now "alive . . . . there in the time she's livin' in," and she has decided she is "not comin' back."  Instead, as the play ends, she awaits the arrival of her benighted husband who is coming to Greece to try to reclaim her for England.  Perhaps, Shirley imagines, she will be able to persuade Joe to join in her adventure of self-renewal.

III. THE CHARACTERS

The only character we see onstage is Shirley.  However, she evokes a small world of other personalities through her story-telling.  Shirley herself is defined through three crucial moments in her life.

The first occurs at school when she eagerly attempts to answer a question posed by a teacher who thinks little of her abilities.  Although--unlike all of her classmates--she responds correctly, the teacher dismisses her accomplishment contemptuously, saying, "You . . . you must have been given the answer."  Shirley's true self--eager, intelligent, hungry for accomplishment and recognition--is thus squelched by the representative of an uncaring social institution.  From that moment, she becomes alienated from school.  She drifts into an early marriage, and thence into the routine life with Joe that is smothering her.

The second crucial moment happens when she decides to go to Greece.  That comes, as we have seen, as the result of a growing despair at the downward course her life has taken since her youth, a process that leads to a frightening sense that the real self so long submerged may be in danger of perishing completely.

The third moment occurs in Greece when she realizes she will not return to England.  She has just spent the day sailing with Costas, a charming local seducer who is nonetheless a "good man," someone who listens to Shirley, who "approves" of her, and who thus enables her to "grow again." Shirley dubs him Christopher Columbus, partly because of his prowess as a sailor, but mostly because of his role in helping her to excavate her buried emotional identity.  As she considers this voyage of self-discovery, she understands that she must stay in Greece because there she has "fallen in love with the idea of livin'."

Throughout all the phases of her life, even in defeat, we sense that Shirley has maintained an underlying sense of humor and vitality, that the human potential buried at school and throughout her life remains alive though hidden.  It is this irrepressible energy, always pushing toward greater intensity and fuller release, that drives the play forward as Shirley carries us along on a torrent of stories, jokes, reminiscenses, and self-revelations.

The other characters in the play are evoked for us by Shirley.  Most vivid is Joe, who "likes everything to be as it's always been.  Like his tea always has to be on the table as he comes through the door.  If the plate isn't landin' on the mat, there's ructions."  Joe is the image of the inertia that imprisons Shirley, the chief external obstacle she must overcome in the process of changing herself.

Costas, by contrast, is a semi-professional romantic, a man who kisses Shirley's stretch marks and calls them "lovely . . . because they were a part of me. . . an' I was lovely. . . ."  Costas "never made y'feel at all threatened.  An' he understood how to talk with a woman.  That's the first thing I noticed about him."  He is, in other words, the opposite of prosaic, hidebound Joe, and he serves as the helmsman of Shirley's voyage of liberation.

We also come to know Shirley's children: Brian, an aspiring busker poet; and Millandra, a young woman of uncertain ambitions.

IV. THEMES

The action of Shirley Valentine can trace its roots at least as far back as Ibsen's A Doll House, a play that ends with another frustrated housewife, Nora Helmer, informing her boring husband that she must leave home and family behind and go off into the world to fulfill her duty to herself.  And behind the figure of Nora, there is yet another archetypal mutineer against conformity and inertia: Goethe's Faust, who also deserts the life he has always known--in his case, that of a scholar and teacher--to pursue the endless adventure of self discovery.  Shirley Valentine, in other words, is a late twentieth-century version of a pervasive modern theme: the romantic quest for liberation, fulfillment, and self-affirmation, the pursuit of rebirth through rebellion.

We may contrast Shirley's decision to repudiate the expectations of her husband and children with the choices made by the central character in Hedda Gabler.  In that play, Hedda cannot fact the possibility of scandal that such rebellious behavior such as would entail.  Instead of taking Shirley's path of rejection and escape, Hedda conceals her deepest desires from her husband and friends, steels herself to endure a life of desperation and boredom, and eventually commits suicide rather than face the consequences of her hidden longings.

Unlike Nora or Hedda, Shirley is a daughter of the working class and a child of the twentieth century.  As the former, she lacks the sense of entitlement to self-fulfillment that Nora and Hedda derive from their more privileged backgrounds.  However, as a product of the modern era, she stands on the shoulders of her predecessors.  Shirley's path has been smoothed by those like Nora and Hedda who have preceded her, and so she faces neither the anguish of the former nor the despair of the latter.  She operates in a world that is essentially sympathetic to her desires.

V. THE SETTING

Shirley Valentine is set in two sharply-contrasting locations, reflecting the transformation of the central character's life.  Act I takes place in the "kitchen of a semi-detached house . . . bearing the signs of additions and alterations which have been made over the years."  A "comfortable and reassuring place," the kitchen is the center of Shirley's circumscribed world, the arena of her growing discontent.  Combining comfort with deadly familiarity, the room is itself a kind of character in this one-woman play.  "Am I talking to the wall?" people say when they feel they are being ignored.   In this play, Shirley actually does speak to the kitchen wall, addressing it as the silent partner in her non-stop conversation about her frustrating life.  As she tells sardonically about her disappointments and defeats, the kitchen provides a wordless confirmation of the narrowness of her life.  While her thoughts travel widely, moving from Freudian psychology to dreams of Greece, she is physically trapped in this banal space, performing the daily ritual of making dinner: the supremely ordinary dish of chips and egg.   In Act II, the setting has moved to "A Greek island.  A secluded section of shore, dotted with rocks and baked by the Mediterranean sun. . . .  In the background we see a hint of the village and the taverna.  The deep blue of the sky predominates."

The contrast could not be greater: we move from inside to outside, from a stuffy working-class house in sunless Liverpool to a beach baked by the Mediterranean sun.  The visual transformation is the external expression of the change in Shirley herself that occurs between the two acts.  Though she is still talking to inanimate objects--now it is a rock on the beach rather than her kitchen wall--she does so less out of exasperation than out of a sense of exuberant happiness at being in such a beautiful place.  If the kitchen was the scene of routine household chores, the beach is a site of pleasure and self-indulgence, its warmth and charm inviting the kind of expansiveness blocked off by the constraints of home.
 

VI. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. How would the play have been different if Shirley's children had been ten years younger?

2. Do you think Joe will join Shirley in Greece?

3. What is the most important factor in Shirley's decision to accept Jane's offer of a free trip to Greece?

4. What is the most important factor in Shirley's decision to stay in Greece?

5. How long do you think Shirley will stay in Greece?  Why?

6. Why do you think the author chose Greece as the place where Shirley changes her life?

7. Why does this play have only one character?  Does this have anything to do with the central theme?

8. What are some devices or techniques that the playwright uses to avoid monotony in a one-character situation?

9. How does the setting relate to the themes of the play?

10. Do you agree with Shirley's choice to leave home and husband?  Why?