THE AUTHOR.

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

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.
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Much as she longs to travel to Greece, she is convinced that such an adventure is impossible for a person like her.  One obstacle is her husband, a man incapable of accepting any change in the routine order of his life.  We see the results of this inflexibility as Shirley frets over the fact that Joe will be coming home on this night, Thursday, expecting his customary meal of "mince," or ground beef.  She has, however, given Joe's hamburger away to a hungry dog, and has instead prepared chips and egg for her husband, an alteration that will undoubtedly infuriate him.  If Joe can be upset by a mere change of menu, Shirley is convinced that her spending two weeks away from home would dumbfound him to the point of total incomprehension and paralysis.  And Joe's anticipated rejection of the idea of Shriley's traveling to Greece merely confirms her own sense of the impossibility of the project: “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.”
 
The first scene ends with Shirley torn between her desire to escape from home and her fear of breaking away.  The second scene begins with Shirley telling us that she is going to Greece.  We learn that her decision has been precipitated by Joe's response to the unscheduled chips and egg.  As he says when he sees the unwelcome dish, "If that's why I'm not gettin' fed properly, because you're savin' up for a foreign holiday, y'can forget it." Shirley's response to this leap of logic is a kind of hysteria:

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.
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Shirley is assailed by second thoughts when her daughter reacts with disgust to the idea of her mother traveling alone to a foreign country, presumably in pursuit of illicit sex.  But she recovers her determination when a next door neighbor gives her a gorgeous silk robe as a token of support for Shirley's adventure, and as an expression of her regret for never having been brave enough to take a similar step herself.
 
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-week 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.

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 disappearing 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 discover the new world of her long-lost self.  As she considers this existential voyage, she realizes 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, reminiscences, 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.

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 face the possibility of scandal that such rebellious behavior 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.

THE SETTING.
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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 wonder 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.

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?