By some quirk of marketing, Letter to Brezhnev is always associated with Margi Clarke. In the 1985 movie, she was the actor who played Teresa, the sharp-talking chicken-factory worker out for a good time in post-industrial Liverpool. The film, though, rightly belongs to Alexandra Pigg as Elaine, Teresa’s best friend, who trades a dead-end life of unemployment for a fantasy fling with a Russian sailor.
A few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union – and a year before Willy Russell’s similarly themed Shirley Valentine – Elaine dared to believe in escape and in border-defying love. On stage, she is played just as winningly by Ellie Clayton and with much the same combination of wit and wonder. She is the Kirkby girl who has a night on the town with a wallet of stolen cash and finds the world unexpectedly opening up to her. Elaine can be naive, petulant and cynical, but she never lets you stop rooting for her.
