Inside a woman's mind

No one understands escapism like Willy Russell. Either side of 1980, he wrote two plays about working-class Liverpool women in flight from a humdrum existence. In one, a young hairdresser seeks fulfilment through a literary education with the Open University. In the other, a middle-aged housewife has an island-holiday romance. As films, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine earned Oscar nominations for, respectively, Julie Walters and Pauline Collins. As plays, they have barely been off the stage in productions worldwide. The Menier Chocolate Factory is reviving the pair in rep. With new actresses — Meera Syal as Shirley and Laura dos Santos as Rita — will they still stand up? The omens are good.

Softening hearts

Recently, Melanie Chisholm, formerly known as Sporty Spice, joined the cast of Blood Brothers, the musical with words, which has been parked in the West End for 20 years. The moving tale of brothers separated at birth reduced hardened critics to pools of tears. No wonder Russell tells writers to forget film and stick to theatre.

"I wrote Rita for £700 (Dh3,838) for 18 nights' performance in the Warehouse — now the Donmar," he says. "I wrote Shirley for £ 1,500 (Dh8,227) for a three-week run at the Everyman. I wrote Blood Brothers for Merseyside Theatre Company for £500 (Dh2,742) to play in schools in Liverpool. I don't sit down every time to make money. If you get it right, a play will always make more money than a movie."

Getting it right is the hard part. Although he claims not to write autobiographically, there's no point in discounting the circumstances of Russell's early life as the fuel for his success. He attributes his ability to inhabit the minds of female characters to a matriarchal upbringing after the war. "Men worked three shifts a day. My granny ran a mobile grocer's on the estate and often, women getting together don't think the kids are listening. You aren't necessarily through your ears but through your pores."

He had further exposure when he left school at 15 with one O level in English and became a ladies' hairdresser. "I was a bad hairdresser. The trade I managed to attract was because people could talk at me. I was probably doing shampoos-and-sets for some women at the first stage of dementia. I can think of two or three. They came in every week and told me the same story about their husbands or the distant past. Some of that had a bearing on me later, at least feeling confident to write about women."

Russell, trimly bearded and dapper, is a personable presence. Just don't stick him in a roomful of blokes. "I can't do male company. It all becomes about the latest car. Put a group of women in a room and it's about what's in my heart."

With Shirley, it was as if he was the ventriloquist's dummy from the moment she opened her mouth. "I wrote the line, ‘I like a glass of juice when I'm doing the cooking.' Then she turned around and said: ‘Don't I, Wall?' And at that moment the play was born.

Russell made Rita a hairdresser so he wouldn't have to research her job. He realised ten years later that the play might have been called Educating Willy.

At 21, he had gone back to do his O levels out of a sudden hunger to acquire an education. He joined a class of 16-year-olds. "I was a Martian. They thought I was a CIA plant. This was in the days before ‘mature student' was commonplace as a term. It had been playing for a long time when I realised it's just glaringly autobiographical. Had I been aware of it, it would have prevented me from writing."

He became a teacher but within a year was writing professionally full-time. His first hit was a play about the Beatles. Premiered at the Liverpool Everyman in 1974, John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert was the first jukebox musical. The play fed on Russell's presence at the birth of Beatles, whom he reckons he saw at the Cavern up to 80 times.

Two of a kind

Of the Liverpool writers who emerged in the Seventies, Russell can be seen as a soft-centred Paul McCartney to Alan Bleasdale's more abrasive John Lennon.

But the comparison with the author of Boys from the Blackstuff is overworked, he insists.

"Alan and I are immensely different writers from Liverpool, are fairly tall men who once taught and have beards."

Where Bleasdale slipped across to television, Russell stuck to the theatre. He doesn't feel he belongs on film sets.