Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir, which came out in 1996, chronicled the life of the then-34-year-old writer who set out on a journey to find herself by visiting Italy, India and Bali. It’s sold millions of copies, has been translated into many languages and was made into a film starring Julia Roberts. Gilbert’s soul-baring book was such a success because many readers shared her feelings of dissatisfaction with the way her life had turned out. Her quest to find happiness gave them hope that change was possible and courage to take the plunge.

Gilbert might have been the most famous, but she was far from the first to explore what happens when women try to break free of the bonds of other people's expectations to find a life that's right for them. A decade earlier, in 1986, Willy Russell’s play Shirley Valentine premiered at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, and this tale of a woman travelling abroad in order to escape her humdrum existence resonated with so many people, particularly women, that soon a new phrase was coined: ‘to do a Shirley Valentine’, which means ‘to go on an odyssey of self-discovery’.

The play continues to be popular, not just in the UK, but around the world and for the next couple of weeks, we can see the new staging at Salisbury Playhouse, directed by Ian Talbot OBE and with Claire Sweeney in the title role. There are few actors better suited to the role of Shirley than Claire, who delivers the playwright’s witty monologue with comic flair and warmth. She said in a recent interview for Salisbury Journal: “It’s me on my own talking for two-and-a-half hours which is terrifying.”

Willy Russell created a heroine to whom many of us can relate: she feels stuck in a rut and so bored she talks to her kitchen walls, yet she is also spirited and refuses to be crushed by the mundanity of her daily routine and empty-nest sadness. When an opportunity to escape, even temporarily, presents itself, she is brave enough to grab it and we cheer her on.

Shirley’s anxieties about her appearance, which, thankfully, she later manages to ditch, also resonate with contemporary audience – when it comes to women’s self-esteem, sadly things haven’t changed all that much. And there are still, indubitably, people who feel trapped in relationships as stultifying as Shirley’s marriage. The central theme of self-fulfilment is timeless. But some aspects of her life, such as her husband’s total domestic ineptitude, reminded me that I was watching a play written in the 80s. The social mores have changed, and ‘doing a Shirley Valentine’ is no longer as audacious or unusual as it used to be – Elizabeth Gilbert and other writers have inspired many women to change their lives. Shirley Valentine’s journey from domestic drudgery to liberation remains entertaining, but is now tinged with nostalgia. I can’t help wondering whether it will still be staged 30 years from now.