Shirley Valentine Shirley Valentine Shirley Valentine is a one-character play by Willy Russell. Taking the form of a monologue by a middle-aged, working class Liverpool housewife, it focuses on her life before and after a transforming holiday abroad. Wondering what has happened to her youth and feeling stagnant and in a rut, Shirley finds herself regularly alone and talking to the wall while preparing an evening meal of egg and chips for her emotionally distant husband. When her best friend offers to pay for a trip-for-two to Greece, she packs her bags, leaves a note on the cupboard door in the kitchen,
Valentine and Orson a European success for the tale. The works of François Rabelais have a number of echoes to the romance. Nancy Ekholm Burkert wrote and illustrated a version of the story in 1989, in which the story is told through the lens of a traveling group of players (including two brothers) who bring the story to a village in Flanders in the Middle Ages. Valentine and Orson Valentine and Orson is a romance which has been attached to the Carolingian cycle. It is the story of twin brothers, abandoned in the woods in infancy. Valentine is brought up as a knight