The Story

Shirley was a supreme actress, with a chameleon type quality that allowed her to duck and dive out of every situation, laughing as she went. Her character is that of an incredibly strong woman – who never took herself too seriously or put on a hard face but used humour to get by not least because she had the gift of knowing how to mimic others. Shirley’s love affair with the sordid but nevertheless glamorous aspects of a life of crime, enabled her to survive, or simply pass through experiences most of us wouldn’t know how to recover from.

It is the psychology of Shirley Pitts – her account of what makes her tick – and the fact that she was an easy person to be around – that will make the dramatic representation of her inner motivation of Gone Shopping a film that people will remember. Shirley Pitts really did masquerade as different types of women when shoplifting, using wigs and outfits to make that happen. She used her femininity to her advantage and adopted many disguises and designer outfits to “blend” in with whatever context she found herself in, in order to “pass” as normal and therefore achieve her criminal aims with success. In the shops, Shirley was often impossible to recognise, even her own children have failed to see her when she dressed in full shoplifting “drag”.

The book’s focus on what lay beneath her image and masquerade provides many opportunities for probing who Shirley was, as to opposed to who Shirley appeared to be. Shirley’s presence and charm impressed everyone who met her, and she reinvented everything including the clothes that she stole (she often restyled them to sell them more easily) but who was she really, takes many compelling pages of the book to understand, and offers many dramatic opportunities.

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