Shirley Valentine/Educating Rita, Trafalgar Studios, London

Given the storyline of these two Willy Russell plays, it seems appropriate that they should flit from the smaller coop of the Menier Chocolate Factory, where they were staged together earlier this year, to the larger Trafalgar Studios. Both deal with personal growth and revitalisation. Seen together, they play off each other, making a great double bill.

Central to both is a vibrant, funny woman, trapped by circumstance. In Shirley Valentine it is a 42-year-old Liverpudlian housewife (played by Meera Syal), who we first encounter peeling spuds for her husband’s egg and chips and chatting to the kitchen wall. Most people know the piece from the 1989 film, with Pauline Collins and Tom Conti, but it started life as a stage monologue. It works very well in its original form, as we are confined with Shirley in her experience of the world, and feel keenly her droll take on mundane routine and the way everyday life contrasts with the vividness of her dreams.

Shirley longs to travel and when a friend offers her a fortnight in Greece she takes the plunge, leaving her husband to his wrath and a freezer full of dinners, and she never looks back. The writing can be sentimental, a bit baroque and self-indulgent in places, but it is also wickedly funny, touching and above all honest. Syal handles it skilfully, giving a superb performance in Glen Walford’s production. She has wonderful comic timing and a great line in mimicry, as she plays all the other characters, but she is ultimately very moving as she asks, “Why do we get all this life when we can’t use it?”

That perplexed sense of having somehow been cheated also runs through Educating Rita (1980). Here Rita (Laura Dos Santos), a 26-year-old hairdresser from Liverpool, wants to better herself and signs up for an Open University course. Her tutor, Frank (Tim Pigott-Smith), is a failed poet with a penchant for the bottle. Both are driven by a tormented sense that meaningful life is just beyond their grasp.

Russell’s drama plays ping-pong with a host of questions: what is education, who is it for, what does culture mean, and, above all, who is educating whom? As Rita learns the tricks of literary criticism, she loses her spontaneity. For her, the path is liberating; for Frank, it quashes her spirit.

In Jeremy Sams’ fine production, you care about both characters. Dos Santos is a lovely, passionate Rita: sharp as her own scissors, blazing away about Macbeth one moment, oiling the jammed door handle the next. And Pigott-Smith gives a beautifully detailed study in self-pity as Frank, the dried-up sceptic who begins to recover his spark. Together the plays make a funny, humane double bill about seizing life while you can.

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