Review: POOR SHIRLEY MUST MAKE HER ESCAPE, Union Theatre

They may be strangers on a train but, in Tom George Hammond’s two-and-a-bit-hander, Shirley and Kieran are not here to swap murders but to discover what real happiness looks like.

Poor Shirley Must Make Her Escape features the winsome pair of Maya McQueen and Will Taylor as two millennials on a vague mission. Both passengers have an excellent idea of what they’re running from but, like amnesiac joggers, much less insight into where exactly they are running to. As they near Budapest, the charming pair with their mismatched cut-glass and working class accents dig into their recent pasts, exchange advice and share a carriage with a boisterous soldier (Daniel Copeland).

Hammond quickly sets up the differences between this odd couple. There's an immediate distinction visually: she’s attired in an expensive-looking white dress while he seems to be equal parts shirt, shorts and sweat. After the train sets off, more details emerge. Despite having a manner more bucolic than alcoholic, Kieran is living la vida vodka, his large rucksack a treasure trove of party booze and stale snacks.

Like a latter-day Lord Byron, he has left his writing gig behind for his own Grand Tour of Europe and boasts of having been to both Milan and Venice (easy now). If he was a stick of rock, you could cut through him to read the words “big night last night”. Currently shacked up with his mum and dad, he wants a different career and this jaunt is his own temporary escape from a homelife beyond its expiry date, a bitty lustlife and an uncertain future.

Shirley, on the other hand, is a literal and emotional mess with her mucky mascara pointing to seven shades of distress. Poor Shirley is not poor, though. Her questions resemble those of royals at the opening of a regional shoe factory and her arch pronouncements to Kieran (“do not observe!” she sternly tells him at one point) are heavy-handed pointers to her privileged background.

Her defensive demeanour — crossed arms, lowered eyes, stubby sentences — slowly unfolds to reveal that she is on the lam not just from her own family and very new husband but from her own ambitions for herself. Like the train she’s just jumped on at Ljubljana without a ticket, she feels that her marriage to a philandering and controlling man is bringing her further and further away from where she really wants to be. 

Copeland makes a late appearance as an off-duty East European soldier who joins their carriage – but not their conversation. With a smile that could bridge the Danube, this bear of a man knows only one phrase intelligible to his companions (“the f*cking English!”) and demonstrates that he can energetically cut a rug to Europe’s hair metal anthem “The Final Countdown”. We can barely understand a word he says but, working within the confines of his limited role, Copeland is magnificent as the epitome of ebullience.

Despite being on a train, neither Shirley nor Kieran can claim a life that is on the rails. Ensconced within a set design composed mostly of luggage and enlivened by a sound design from Hammond and Ella McQueen, the travellers bond over their respective travails and troubles. They have yet to work out that everyone but everyone is making it up as they go along, that the game was rigged way before they started playing, and that their existence will ultimately be most likely defined more by unexpected curveballs and opportunities than their own decisions and efforts. 

In the programme, writer and director Hammond self-deprecatingly calls himself “one of Britain’s least known playwrights” and extols the contributions of his leads; given that McQueen apparently likes taking risks and Taylor prefers things shorter, it’s unlikely either actor had significant input into an unwieldy title more suited to a stodgy Sunday afternoon kitchen sink drama than this sprightly work. With the assistance of director Sean Turner, this express 75-minute production keeps the story rolling along and never lets the pace up.

There's some shared DNA with 1995’s indie darling Before Sunrise (in which two lovers have a marathon heart-to-heart after first meeting on a train from Budapest) but Poor Shirley is more about the journey than the ticket barrier. And even though this play has nothing new to say about life, the universe or anything, it is a sheer joy to watch these two bantering away aided and abetted by their soldier acquaintance. If this trip has a return leg, book me a window seat.

Poor Shirley Must Make Her Escape continues at the Union Theatre until 16 November.