Sheridan Smith is a transcendent one-woman Shirley Valentine — review

Shirley Valentine

Duke of York’s Theatre, London

The scent and sizzle of hot fat fills the room as Sheridan Smith fries an egg on stage in Shirley Valentine — a mundane moment made exotic and strange by the gilded splendour of the theatre’s interior.

If you’re familiar with the 1989 film of the same name, you might be expecting her cantankerous husband to shamble in for his tea. But it’s Willy Russell’s original 1986 one-woman play we’re dealing with here, so Smith single-handedly commands the stage in a transcendent performance as the disillusioned Liverpool housewife determined to unstick herself from a life glued to the kitchen.

As she scrapes her knife over sliced bread, she delivers a tirade against her margarine-bland life: her kids have grown up and left, her friends have vanished, her husband expects to be waited on, and she’s totally lost sight of the popular, rebellious girl she once was. Smith is theoretically delivering her monologue to “wall”, the grease-splattered, silent recipient of her confidences. But really, she’s talking straight to the audience, unpacking every ounce of humour in Russell’s witty script. “Marriage is like the Middle East, isn’t it? There’s no solution,” she quips. You can almost feel people leaning forward, drinking in each line, and it’s not just the obvious jokes that bring laughs: Smith is the kind of performer who can have a thousand-odd people in fits purely by mimicking her pretentious neighbour saying “taramasalata”.

Inevitably, some moments in Russell’s play feel dated — in an era when Cher is still wearing fishnets at 76, Valentine’s laments that her life is over at 42 might be funnier than their writer originally intended. And perhaps Smith seems too sunny and full of life to convey fully the bitterness of some of her lines. Would a woman with this much spirit really be ready to give up on her life halfway through?

But those qualms drop away as Valentine’s transformation begins: Smith radiates joy as she starts to indulge her own long-suppressed appetites, instead of catering to those of others.

Russell is so good at striking a balance between tenderly chronicling working-class lives and gently suggesting that these people’s hunger for something more, something greater. In his 1980 play Educating Rita, it’s knowledge, and in Shirley Valentine it’s the thrill of another country, a sun-drenched world of sexual and social possibilities.

“I’m going to Greece for the sex — sex for breakfast, sex for dinner, sex for tea and sex for supper!” she shouts out into the grey streets, the audience in stitches.

Everything about director Matthew Dunster and designer Paul Wills’ gorgeous staging is pitched between naturalism and too-bright intensity, the saturated pastel colours seeming to come from within Valentine’s heated imagination. Smith delivers the play’s closing manifesto for living a fuller life with her whole body in a sun-drenched inducement to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” It’s a cliché to describe something as life-affirming. But the world really does feel like a brighter, more exciting place after a couple of hours in Valentine’s company.

★★★★★

To June 3, thedukeofyorks.com

Women, Beware the Devil

Almeida Theatre, London

Playwright Lulu Raczka is also interested in the desires women hide. But rather than tinting them in sunny hues, her strange, dark play Women, Beware the Devil makes them something you’d rather not look at, like leeches writhing on a wound.

Agnes, a mud-splattered young drudge, has been accused of cursing a manor house’s cows. They are dying, and instead of milk, they seep blood. Silk-clad noblewoman Elizabeth believes the accusations — it is, after all, late 17th-century England, when pamphlets on witchcraft are everywhere. But rather than preparing the gibbet, Elizabeth sees an opportunity to use Agnes’s powers for her own ends.

The drama that ensues is an unclassifiable one: part folk horror, part Blackadder-ish comedy, part Faustian morality fable. Agnes climbs from the bottom of this society to the very top, her reward for helping the ruthless Elizabeth manipulate her idiotic, but far more powerful brother Edward (a consistently hilarious Leo Bill). Alison Oliver’s thoughtful performance in this central role evolves beautifully, as she grows from a petulant serving girl who kicks like a pony when thwarted to a dignified, silk-clad lady with an insatiable hunger for beauty, knowledge and power.

Raczka’s play is subtle and knowing in its explorations of the ways women in patriarchal societies are forced to manipulate the men around them to get what they want: the entranced Edward barks like a dog on Agnes’s command. It intricately demonstrates how ancient power structures both sustain and destroy us. But it’s a little unsatisfying, too, because it attempts to fit so many themes into its span, ones that you would need a TV series to fully unpack.

Plot lines spring up without ever fully blossoming, like bulbs stopped short by a late frost. As the Devil himself, the suave Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea delivers a witty, mannered prologue, then largely vanishes from view. The civil war arrives at the gates of the manor house in the second act, showing how these royalist nobles will sacrifice everything to maintain the status quo — but it all happens too fast to feel fully devastating.

Still, there are some fascinating ideas beating at this play’s black heart, and they are well served by this slick, sumptuous production. Rupert Goold’s direction is swift and ruthless, while Miriam Buether’s design is as ingenious as a Jacobean sideboard, accommodating hidden surprises and lavish, painterly banquets that drip with jewels and pearls. This play is a feast of unsettling revelations and hidden desires. It’s an impressive, unconventional statement of intent from Raczka, who is no doubt on a dark upward trajectory of her own.

★★★☆☆

To March 25, almeida.co.uk