A Comparison between Billy Liar and Shirley Valentine Essay -- Drama

A Comparison between Billy Liar and Shirley Valentine I have just been studying Billy Liar and performing it as part of my mock scripted drama GCSE, and have been asked to compare this theatre script to the film script of Shirley Valentine. I have already given the first difference between these two scripts; one is a theatre script and the other is designed specifically for the big screen. Billy Liar was originally a novel written by Keith Waterhouse, who with the help of Willis Hall made it into a theatre script in the 1960's. Billy is an imaginative youth who is fighting to get out of his complacent, clichà ©-ridden background. He was born and brought up in a town in Yorkshire and lives with his father, Geoffrey, mother, Alice, and grandmother, Florence. Billy has three girlfriends, Rita, Barbara and Liz, but he only shows genuine affection and feelings towards Liz. Billy is always fantasising and making up things which earns him the label 'liar'. At the end of the play Billy decides to leave his home and follow Liz to London but as we find out in the last scene he 'chickens' out and returns to the home he so desperately wants to escape. Shirley Valentine on the other hand was written as a film script, by the author Willy Russell in the 1980's, but the story is very similar to that of Billy Liar. Shirley is a housewife and mother to two grown up children. Her husband Joe is very insensitive and unaffectionate. Shirley's best friend Jane invites Shi...