By Emma
Link: https://somegirl.co.uk/
Available until: Saturday 1st May. You have access for 72 hours.
Some Girl I Used to Know was inspired by the film of Shirley Valentine. I’ve never seen it but Sophie said the play was good so I read it and it is really good. I wouldn’t say I identify with it exactly because Shirley is quite a lot older than me but she’s a really great character and a nice person and when actors started filming monologues I did think how nice it would be if one of the theatres put on Shirley Valentine.
If the film of Shirley Valentine is half as good (and it probably is because it was written by Willy Russell who wrote the play) I can totally see how it inspired Denise van Outen to write Some Girl I Used to Know. It is the sort of play that makes you feel inspired and there are lots of similarities with Shirley Valentine. Denise’s character Stephanie seems a lot younger than Shirley and I think she is if my maths is right but it has a lot of the same ideas.
Stephanie is a much more modern woman than Shirley but this play kind of shows that even though society changes, people don’t change nearly as much. Shirley is a housewife, Stephanie has a career. Shirley is a mother, Stephanie isn’t. Shirley has to run away to Greece to get some time to herself, Stephanie just has to wait for her next work trip. But they’re both women who’ve taken their life in one particular direction and they’ve reached a sort of crisis point where they question everything what they’ve done and realise they aren’t happy and something needs to change. Shirley finds an attractive younger man. Stephanie makes contact with her high school sweetheart on facebook and tells him which hotel she’s in. Sometimes women – and men and non-binary people I’m sure – want to feel attractive and cared about, even if they know deep down that the person they’ve turned to doesn’t really care.
It’s a really important story. Shirley and Stephanie get stuck in their lives because they kept on doing the same things and don’t stop to think about what they really want. These plays are like warnings (and not just to women) to keep on thinking about where your life is going and whether you like where it’s going and to keep talking to the other people in your life and make sure they’re happy. If you don’t talk to them, you might eventually get to a stage where you feel like you can’t talk to them.
Denise and Terry Ronald have written this story really beautifully. Stephanie is in a hotel room alone after a work event. She gets lots of calls from her husband Paul, who is getting really annoying. She’s supposed to be meeting a journalist later that evening to discuss her work. A facebook message from her high school sweetheart Sean sets off a whole chain of memories for Stephanie. She looks back on her life and the things that have happened to her and links them up with the unhappiness she feels with her life now. It’s very moving and you really feel for Stephanie. She’s been through a lot and she isn’t a bad person but she’s got a need for human companionship. She feels emotionally distant from Paul, she’s been wrapped up in her work and I think she’s lost touch with a lot of her friends and she seems so lonely.
A few times during the play, Denise sings a song. They’re really emotional songs which seem right for the things Stephanie are feeling and talking about and Denise performs them really brilliantly. I don’t think I’ve heard her sing before but she has a really beautiful voice and she puts so much feeling into the songs.
Denise acts the monologue really well too. I think it was filmed over several days as there are subtle differences in the way her hair is curled but it feels like it was filmed in one take, the way the emotions slowly build up. It’s an amazing performance anyway but if it was done over several days, Denise has done really well to get the emotional pitch exactly right and carry on where she left off.
Tamzin Outhwaite directs this very well. Stephanie is mostly sitting on the bed but all the movement she does feels like movement she naturally would do at that moment. It’s like Tamzin has gone so deeply into the story, not just the events of if but the emotional changes too and this really shows in the finished play. I really like Ben Robbins’ sound too, mostly you only hear the actual sounds like Denise’s voice and the sound of her phone but at the moments where there’s a really strong emotional memory, you hear sounds that Stephanie would have heard at that time and which you can imagine she’s hearing right now too like a sort of echo in her mind of what happened. It works really well.
Some Girl I Used to Know is a really interesting,
thought-provoking and beautiful play. (And so is Shirley Valentine.)
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