How does Willy Russell make the audience sympathise with Shirley Valentine?

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How does Willy Russell make the audience sympathise with Shirley Valentine?

  In this essay I will be exploring how Willy Russell, the author of the play

‘Shirley Valentine’, makes us sympathise with his main characters. Russell himself comes from a working class background and was born in Liverpool which is where half the play was set. He started of as a hairdresser and from here he got an insight into women’s life .He started to attend night class on drama and this is where he picked up his love for script writing. After this he began to write comical songs and then he began to write scripts. His first play 'Blind Scouse' was premiered at Edinburgh festival and then in 1990 he wrote 'Shirley Valentine'. Kitchen sink drama deals with working class people and their everyday lives, and this is related with Shirley as this play deals with her everyday life. Kitchen sink drama relates with 'Shirley Valentine' in many aspects and this play may be influenced by kitchen sink drama. Therefore, Russell's past experiences of him growing up in a feminine household has influenced this play by being the basis of Shirley's aspects on life. It also concerns working class lives, social problems and relationships.

Willy Russell invite us to feel sympathy for Shirley by portraying her as a person with many hopes and need unrealised. For instance, how she is treated by her husband almost like a slave, how she is treated by her daughter who took her for granted, how she was treated by her intolerant teachers and finally the fact that she was born into a lower class.

   I believe that Russell is successful at making his readers feel sorry for her and in doing so he becomes a supporter of female rights.

Russell writes the play with characters trapped in realistic social situation. The title sequence and opening scenes help to establish Shirley's character, by demonstrating atmosphere background and expressions. Moreover, there is a lot we can deduce from images. Firstly there are sketches in the opening of the film which instinctively grabs the audience's attention towards the main motif of the film, from the continuous references referred by Shirley's point of view, to the implication of Shirley's incompleteness as a person. Similarly, The colour schemes used in the images are blues and purples which symbolises a connotation of sadness and depression, also the colour white indicates plain/ emptiness, these visual devices show a replication of the Shirley's life as a whole. Shirley has an unsociable life and that builds up to her being a woman with a lack of confidence. Shirley is portrayed as a sad house bound woman, forgotten, not appreciated nonexistent, and a woman with a loss of identity. "A girl is born to fly;" This is shown as a metaphor, as she is supposed to be free but is trapped

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Drinking through the day, indicating that she is bored, lonely and doesn't have a very good social life: "There's a woman three doors down the road - talks to her microwave! Wall, what's the world coming to?" When Shirley drinks through the day, it shows that she is really quite depressed and that the alcohol actually took her away from the dull predicament that she was in. This appears to have been quite common in housewives during the 1980s. By 6 o'clock, Shirley's in the kitchen preparing Joe's dinner and talking to the wall, "Do you know what i ...

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