“River City” star Sally Reid on her “deep” new role

“She realised she had to make a change. Nine times out of 10 when I played that role, at least one person came up to me in the bar afterwards and said they were ready to make a change. That's pretty profound. And it moves me every time I do it.” The character is Shirley Valentine, and the role is the one-woman version of the story as originally written by Liverpool playwright Willy Russell before it became a major box office hit in the 1980s with Pauline Collins and Tom Conti.

The performance – for which Sally has already won a Scottish Theatre Critics Award – should come with a warning, she discovered after her friend joined the theatre in 2022. “You always connect with your characters. But when I played Shirley Valentine, I could never resonate with a character so much.” The play opens at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh this week before moving to the Pitlochry Festival Theatre later in the summer. The story of a middle-aged woman coming to terms with the fact that her life is at a crossroads touches not only audiences, but also Sally every night she performs the play.

She says: “I did it for the first time two years ago. Shirley was 42 and I was about to turn 42. I remember thinking, 'How can she be my age?' I'm not married and I don't have any children and she was 42 and she thought she had no choices in her life, she had no life left in her. That really hit me. Nowadays some people don't start families or think about who they want to be until they're 42. One of the things Shirley says is not to 'waste' life. And that really touches me.

“I think Shirley Valentine can speak to you at any point in life. At the end she comes to the conclusion that she's nothing special, that she's not going to go down in the history books, but she's alive. And that's quite profound.” The play has played a role in Sally's grief process following the loss of her mother, Florence, last year. “The first time I played Shirley Valentine was before I lost my mother. And now I feel like life is so fast and so precious. We really have to make the most of it. It's a saying that's been around forever, but it's so true.

“Mum was so full of life and so supportive and loved what I was doing. She saw Shirley Valentine for the first time after she had finished chemotherapy and she loved it. It might sound trite but it's true: I feel her around me every day.” That's not the only thing that helped Sally process her feelings this summer. She took part in a charity bike ride around Scotland with her brother and father to raise money for Maggie's cancer charity. Her mother benefited from the organisation's work and was a keen fundraiser herself.

(Image: Sally Reid)

“Mum never learned to ride a bike,” says the Scot Squad and River City actress. “I don't know what she would have thought of what we did. She's raised a lot of money herself so we wanted to honour that by doing something to raise money for something close to her heart.” The challenge saw the trio cover 250 miles in four days, visiting all seven Scottish golf courses from west to east that hosted the British Open Championship, which finished at Maggie's in Dundee.

Sally said: “Mum was diagnosed with bile duct cancer in 2020. For a while she responded to many surgeries and treatments, but in late 2022 the cancer came back and she passed away in January 2023.

“From the moment she got sick, my mother was a huge supporter of Maggie's. My father is one of those golf fanatics,” says Sally. “My mother jokingly called herself the 'golf widow'. But she used it to her advantage. Whenever my father went on golf trips, she would meet up with all the other women and they too enjoyed many trips to Scotland. So we wanted to experience the beauty of the Scottish countryside that she loved so much on this adventure.”

Sally is not a natural on the bike. “The first time I went on a training ride with my dad I was so nervous I felt like a little girl who had just had her training wheels taken off. But before I knew it, after a couple of runs I was out for 20 miles in the countryside and I was having a blast. For me it's like meditation now. It's brilliant. Being out on the bike really gives you space to think,” she adds. “I wouldn't have been the last person to say that before, but now I feel it. I think I'm actually addicted to the endorphins released by exercise.

“Grief hits you at the most inopportune times and in the most inopportune places,” said Sally. “You just have to embrace it. I find that sport is really helpful, as is the feeling of achieving something, of making progress. It's good!”

Shirley Valentine plays at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre until September 28th.
You can visit justgiving.com/crowdfunding/goforflo to support Sally and her family's bike fundraising challenge. pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com