Shirley's sun shines

 

I should advise a potential conflict of interest but it is nice when the Canberra Theatre Centre invites you to a performance.  I guess it's my blog that does it.  Does this make me an influencer?  Maybe, but very much i- not I-.  I wonder if this is relevant for the performance I attended, Shirley Valentine.  Perhaps so.  It was a film about 30 years back, and massively popular, here resurrected for our times.  A story of a woman who wishes to make her life, break free of a limiting marriage and social conventions, escaping England for Greece when her best friend wins two tickets for a 2-week holiday.  Well there's always truth in that: travel is very immediate and enlivening and breaking habits enlivens the soul.  It may have downsides but mostly it's just days of escape.  She hesitates but finally takes up the offer and has a fling and expands her horizons and her husband chases her to return and the final words are hers, sipping white wine on a beach and hailing her husband who has come to find her but who hadn't recognised her in her satin and relaxation, to sit for a drink.  It's not Tolstoy but it is relevant and obviously understood by a welcoming female-dominated audience and even held some touching and telling moments.  And the performance was something to take awe at, a one-woman show of almost 2 solid hours, excluding  the interval, speaking to walls and rocks and a pretty-much full house.  I liked that she could question herself along with others: she has a go at men through her husband, but it's not an identity-wide anger.  And I found a few stories that cut to home, not least about how men can take over conversations.  So an impressive performance of a worthy little piece of rom-com-ish fiction that has real-world resonances.  As for Greek beach life, I might choose otherwise, but then I'm not a moderately-deprived Liverpudlian.

Natalie Bassingthwaighte (actor) performed Shirley Valentine at Canberra Theatre. 

Thanks to old workmate Kirsty Young for some great pics from the previous day's media call.  (And one of mine).  See more of her pics on Instagram kirstyyoungdigitalart