Although the script is littered with references to 80s culture, Shirley Valentine retains its powerful message of self-realisation and female liberation. A one-woman show in two acts, playwright Willy Russell catalogues the pressures and oppression of domestic life on a woman who once imagined an exciting future, before offering a tale of redemption.

Sally Reid, as its titular protagonist, captures the first act’s anguish and the second half’s potential. At first, she describes her mundane existence, trapped between husband and adult children, slowly dwindling away until her only company is the kitchen wall and various semi-detached friends. Reid manages to expose Valentine’s pain without slipping into self-pity; even before her personal renaissance, Valentine is compassionate, thoughtful and witty, and Reid expresses the longing and thwarted imagination with charm. When Valentine finds her salvation in Greece, Reid sacrifices none of that charm, but reveals how she is not only saving herself, but willing to be generous to those who, perhaps, once encouraged her to see herself as lesser.

Russell’s script, however, feels uneven. The longer first act dwells in the misery of Liverpudlian life, a series of conversations that Valentine recalls becoming a predictable litany of frustrations, interspersed by surprises which ultimately motivate her to take a risk on holiday. Against this, the second act is too brief, and her redemption only sketched out, leaving the production askew.

Director Elizabeth Newman allows the first act to dawdle before tightening up some energy for the resolution: the imbalance of those two acts, however, encourages a sense that the script drags rather than races. Yet Reid’s performance is as triumphant as the character of Shirley Valentine herself, projecting charisma and passion and the humane dynamism that is Russell’s message. 

Shirley Valentine, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Thursday 4 July–Saturday 28 September; reviewed at Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh.