As the smell of frying drifts through Trafalgar Studio One, Shirley Valentine shuffles eggs around a pan, chattering away brightly. In some ways it’s like a scene from reality television, an evening in the Big Brother house. Set in a floating Formica domestic simulacrum built solely for exposure, Shirley’s forthright honesty with the audience, her extrovert storytelling, her regionality, all conspire to something like a composite of all the reality show’s watchable characters. Yet Shirley’s kitchen sink moment (replete with plumbing) stands for the superiority of theatre’s reality over reality television. A timely reminder that playwrights like Willy Russell are still available to convey to us the national ordinary, a nuanced picture of the regions, to convey discourses of class and self-transformation with more honesty and in fuller flesh than the reality television format could ever aspire to.

The two frying eggs are slightly ambiguous in Russell’s text. Certainly they stand for servility, the yolk a yoke. Shirley cooks for a husband whose dull regularity and lack of appreciation for her supporting role is beginning to chafe. Yet they also speak of a mother’s empty nest, providing the impetus for Shirley’s squeezing out from under the limits of her class and gender horizons. And so they also might stand for rebirth. Shirley’s story is one of transformation, a theme shared with Rita in tonight’s double-bill as part of the Trafalgar’s Willy Russell revival. Unlike Rita, Shirley doesn’t turn to eagle-eyed investments in cultural capital, rather she relies on a summoning of herself, a Liverpudlian facing-up to matters, a soft stoicism and presence of mind. Because Willy Russell’s play still stands for a progressive cultural conception class, where personal and regional qualities can overcome a culture of poverty, where a signifying woman can be an agent of her own destiny, and with the power to say no, can transform her life.

Both of Russell’s plays are like a breath of fresh air in a landscape where the narratives of self-transformation are corralled by the reality format. Where Russell might have stood twenty years ago giving voice to the national ordinary, now reality shows and their techniques - from gameshows to docusoaps to news programmes - increasingly proclaim their democratic victory, telling us we are finally reflected to ourselves. Yet even a cursory glance at these claims reveals their emptiness. Far from reality, reality shows offer a cultural space where transformation, especially that of women, is predicated upon certain distorted judgements. We’re familiar with the roll call, too fat; too old; too tarty; too frumpy; too real; too fake. As the class theoristy Bev Skeggs has noted, these programmes dangle a bland and consumerist middle-class ‘universal particular’ above their contestants, which is wielded as both carrot and stick, a noose with which to hang excessive class gestures and sexuality, a gameshow prize to deliver a glittering new life. At the same time as these shows actively plot paths to our own transformations, they ruthlessly carry out an obliteration of difference and depth.

Where the reality show promises that the knots of resentment and failure that accrue over a lifetime can be ironed out by a layer of gloss, a smooth pose, a camera flash transition into a world of media values - Shirley Valentine denies this weightlessness. She is rooted by culture, class failure, a living gender, anchors that make changing life and locale a matter of guilt and complexity. Her negotiations with herself, with her educational history and self-esteem bear the structural traces of a real life.  Sitting on a beach sipping wine at a table with its feet washed in the Aegean sea, realising her dream entails realising its limitations, she finds more questions, more negotiations. Shirley is the type of person we would willingly invite into our living rooms. With Shirley, becoming never looked so real.

Till 30 October 2010