One of my oldest friends – as in "long-time", not "ancient" – friends lives in a village-has-become-suburb of Cardiff, Wales. When I visit her, not nearly often enough, I admit, the phrase "…some tea and we'll have a nice gossip, then" often occurs. A chat, whether at a kitchen table or on a sofa, long, and relaxed, is what she means, not tales murmured behind the hand about scandalous neighbors.
"Shirley Valentine" has that feeling. The one-woman show from Dramatic License Productions is about a Liverpudlian in the post-Beatle years of the early to mid 1980's. She's fallen into the rut of letting life just happen to her. Shirley Valentine Bradford is a middle-class housewife, perhaps even lower-middle, with a husband of the sort who demands his evening meal be on the table when he steps foot on the doormat. (Dangerous, eh wot?) Shirley speaks wistfully of wanting to drink wine where the grapes are grown, sipping a glass, then gulping, as she cooks.
Teresa Doggett is Shirley, whose monologue is addressed to the wall – as in, "I might as well be talking to the wall." But there's far more intimacy in Doggett's Shirley than an impersonal slab of plasterboard can appreciate. She pulls the whole audience in, not just women, confiding and explaining and self-deprecating and mourning. And charming along the way. It's an intimate performance, helped along by the small venue. This isn't Doggett's first experience with Shirley; she played her several years ago at Stray Dog Theatre, and it's a polished performance. (Doggett also works as a costumer at several companies around town, and did her own, perfectly off-kilter, wardrobe for this.)
One could make the argument that this play, with its theme of a woman awakening to her own power, is dated. Playwright Willy Russell generally seems to understand women rising to their own worth – his first big hit was "Educating Rita", another play turned into a film, as was "Shirley". And yet it's universal – this was one of my late husband's favorite plays, perhaps because he had three daughters. But opening night, there were plenty of murmured editorial noises from the rows behind me, all definitely women.
Good work from Doggett, of course, director Lee Ann Matthews and all the crew who managed to put the set together in a week. And, yes, she is actually cooking in that first scene. It's not sound effects and Smell-O-Rama.
Shirley Valentine
Dramatic License Productions
Chesterfield Mall
636-821-1746
www.DramaticLicenseProductions.org
through March 16