Smallscreen Reviews

Review: 'Shirley' on BBC2

By Ian Cullen Sep 30, 2011, 16:02 GMT

Putting in a mesmerizing performance as the young Shirley Bassey is Ruth Negga, who somehow manages to capture the singers mannerisms and sensuality of her fantastic stage performances.

Synopsis: Drama charting the rise to fame of singer Dame Shirley Bassey.

As part of the BBC’s celebration of Mixed Race Britain this drama probably profiles one of our biggest home grown stars and charts her humble upbringing in the Welsh working class area of Tiger Bay in Splott and her eventual rise to fame.

Putting in a mesmerizing performance as the young Shirley Bassey is Ruth Negga, who somehow manages to capture the singers mannerisms and sensuality of her fantastic stage performances.

This one off drama deals with roughly the first ten years of Shirley Bassey’s career from her first meeting with her Manager Mike Sullivan (Charlie Creed - Miles) to the end of her marriage with up and coming film director Kenneth Hume (Henry Lloyd - Hughes).

As a young kid I was familiar with Shirley Bassey because of the songs she had sang for the three James Bond films that she’d done the title songs for and also remember being practically hypnotized by her television specials for the BBC. So I was only ever really familiar with her as an established star and had little to no clue about her struggles and what she had to give up in order to gain her stardom.

Ruth Negga puts in a fantastic performance as the shy girl from Tiger Bay and shows us how she grows into the woman that practically has to lead somewhat of a double life as the performer and the individual, but also having to deal with racism and the dehumanizing effects that can have.

The scenes where Shirley leaves her home and her daughter in Tiger Bay to pursue her singing career are heart wrenching and the theme throughout the film is much to do with Shirley’s struggle to have some normality somewhere amid the madness of her career as an in demand singer of torch songs.

Early in her career Shirley feared that her having a young daughter would compromise her chances of fame and fortune, and at the suggestion of her manager Mike Sullivan she left her Daughter with her sister and mother. Her daughter was raised to believe that her mother was really her aunt in order to give Shirley an acceptable public image. And the film deals with Shirley’s struggles about this very well.

We also see Shirley’s first marriage played out to aspiring film director Kenneth Hume and its eventual break down when Shirley catches him with another man. For a time he tried to take over managing her career and promised her the role of Nancy in the movie adaptation of the musical Oliver. The role ultimately went to Shani Wallis.

Negga plays out the outrage of Shirley not getting the Nancy role brilliantly, and when faced with the reasoning that they were always going to cast a white actress in the role in spite of the fact that Shirley had made one of the musical numbers a smash hit. You could understand her bitter disappointment and the scene in which Shirley confronts her first husband with her outrage is utterly believable.

We also get a strong performance from Lesley Sharp, who plays Shirley’s white mother Eliza, and in so many ways it was Eliza’s influence that pushes Shirley into reaching for her dream, but at the same time the relationship is troubled by the fact that Shirley has had to hide the fact that she has a daughter and her mother played a pretty big part in facilitating that lie, which ultimately put somewhat of a wedge between the mother and daughter. Of course as a mother Eliza wanted the best for Shirley and saw that Shirley had the chance of an extraordinary career and pushed her toward that goal so that Shirley could have a better life than the poverty she had know while growing up.

Thankfully we do get a reconciliation of sorts by the end of the film when we see Shirley in her dressing room about to go on stage being free of the lie and having her daughter back. Before being called onto stage she tells  her mum, ‘I’m my own woman now.’

All in all this was a very powerful drama and this review cannot really do it justice. My guess is this drama only manages to tell a small percentage of the struggles that Shirley Bassey had during her rise to fame and the subsequent sacrifices that she would have had to have made insofar as wanting an ordinary life when not on the stage.

Bringing the point home that it can be very, very lonely at the top.

5 stars