‘Shirley Valentine’ is a rescue act from the ’80s but still very funny

I’ll admit to a certain bias. Sue Diepeveen, veteran of the SA stage and screen — and for the past six years owner-manager of the Drama Factory in Somerset West — has generously allowed me to take up some of her theatre’s office space. So anything I write that is linked to the Drama Factory should come with a minor disclaimer.

Nevertheless, I do love the place. I love its unusual location: in a business park along the N2 highway, with the townships of Nomzamo and Lwandle on one side and the light industria of Strand on the other. The surrounding area offers natural beauty and leisure aplenty: beach, vineyard, mountain. But this part of the Helderberg is about work. Here people make stuff.

The soundscape includes angle grinders, drills and welding machines. In nearby streets, motor mechanics and scrap metal dealers are the order of the day. The Drama Factory’s immediate neighbours trade in pet food, lawn products and air conditioners.

The magic that happens at the Drama Factory doesn’t occur despite this context, but rather because of it. Theatre makers come from far and wide to create, alongside their fellow artists and artisans, what remains a relatively rare thing in SA: an intimate, independent theatre space where you can experiment, play, build an audience — in short, you can work.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of watching Shirley Valentine at the Drama Factory, a revival of Willy Russell’s 1986 play starring Natasha Sutherland and directed by Gina Shmukler. The production has already toured to various venues around the country and opened this week at Monte Casino in Johannesburg, where it will run until July 3 before returning to the Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town in August.

Shirley Valentine, of course, longs to escape the mundane workaday world, to discover a sense of excitement and purpose. This means travelling to the exotic island landscapes of Greece; her dream cannot be fulfilled in working class Liverpool. If she remains there, her desires will simply be frustrated, displaced into drinking too many glasses of white wine.

She is also driven away by her husband’s self-centredness and, indeed, his cruelty. In Greece she enjoys the delights of sea and sex, but also — as in all quest narratives — she finds herself. This means coming to terms with a life of compromise, in which her youthful hopes and ambitions were stilted by her roles as wife and mother.

It is a quietly poignant and redemptive tale. It is also very funny.

Most people who know Shirley Valentine have in mind the 1989 film version, for which Pauline Collins reprised the role that had won her Olivier and Tony awards on the West End and Broadway. It is an iconic piece of cinema, but like many cultural products of the 1980s, it tends to get lumped into the garishness and lack of subtlety associated (probably unfairly) with that decade’s pop culture and fashion.

Sutherland recuperates Shirley Valentine and her narrative — the sadness, the self-awareness, the tragicomic heroism — from such a process of misremembering. Yet she retains the comedy, captured in the distinctive Scouse accent of this much-loved character. With a simple set and a handful of props, we are convincingly transported to Merseyside and then to the Mediterranean. There is a particularly telling moment in the first half of the play, set in Shirley’s prison-like kitchen, where she talks to the wall while peeling potatoes for her husband’s dinner (steak and chips at 6pm, every night). The lights dim as she lies down, gazing at the ceiling; in a masterly stroke by Shmukler and Sutherland, the mood is captured by A-ha’s Take On Me.

This is not the upbeat synthpop hit from the 1980s, however, but a gentle acoustic version that the band performed at an MTV Unplugged concert in 2017. The melody still soars in Morten Harket’s distinctive falsetto, but it is slow and sombre. The change lends the lyrics new significance as a way of interpreting Shirley Valentine’s story: she is “slowly learning that life is OK”, but only if you are willing to take a risk — because “it’s no better to be safe than sorry”.