The door to the green room where Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal is reading the character of Shirley Bradshaw nee Valentine -- an average Liverpool housewife wedded to the home -- opens, and a visitor peeps in to see if there is someone inside. One follows the other, but no one -- or nothing -- seems to distract the versatile actress from her rehearsal of Shirley Valentine, by Willy Russell, of Educating Rita fame. It's a one-man show. One-woman show, to be precise. What started as an '80s trend in Europe, is now fast catching on in the world of theatre. The stage at St Andrew's Auditorium, Bandra, has been set five days in advance. Bholanath Sharma has worked hard on the spongy rocks and the boat by the waters of Greece -- the stage for Act Two. It is lightsman Kaivan Mistry's turn to perceive how he can work wonders with illumination. They are yet to workon the sets for the 50-minute-long Act One -- the kitchen, where Shirley has spent the better part of her life, talking to its wall.

I love you. It's funny, this `I love you'. They should bottle it and sell it. Shirley speaks to the barrier between her and the world outside, referring to her husband Joe who speaks nicely to every other woman he doesn't love but illtreats someone he's fond of. I have been talking to this wall for years. I am frightened of life beyond it. Hey wall! look at the sun and the way it's shining! "No, don't look at the audience. Pretend as if you are looking outside the window, that's within the view of `your' wall," interrupts Kaizad Navroze Kotwal, the actress' writer-actor-director son, who in the midst of his doctorate in technology in theatre came down from the US to direct Shirley Valentine.

After having her fill of talking to the wall and living a cocooned life -- being a mother of convenience to a daughter and wife to a husband who often flings hischips-and-eggs dinner at her because he is expecting something else -- Shirley starts to pack for Greece, the land of sun, sand and taramasalata, with friend Jane. Mahabanoo, who will soon be seen in Ivory Merchant's Cotton Mary, doesn't tire of talking non-stop -- and half-an-hour seems like nothing to her. "I have got used to it. I have been doing this since the day I started learning my lines," she says. "That's why I want to wait before I learn the lines for Romance for Ruby, Naseeruddin Shah's project with me and Ratna Pathak Shah."

So Shirley continues. She talks about how she ran into Jillian, while she was buying Joan Collins underwear. Her friend, she says, is the sort of person who tops your headache complaint by saying she has a brain tumour.

And then adds a dollop of sympathy. I told her I am off to Greece with my lover and ran off before she told me about her two-year torrid romance with Robert Redford. Then it is all about adventures in Greece with Costas, her ChristopherColumbus and friend -- a rock on the beach.

"It's a story of every woman. My domestic help has blossomed since her alcoholic husband died. So Shirley has been kept Shirley, without adapting Russell's work," says Mahabanoo, admitting that she doesn't like adaptations.By the end of it, Shirley Bradshaw is finally Shirley Valentine again. All of us don't do what we want to do. We do what we have to, and pretend that's what we want. We carry so much unused life in us. Shirley Valentine is not going to be remarkable, she's not going to be in history books. But today she has come to like herself.

At St Andrew's, Bandra (West). On August 29. Time: 7.45 pm.