Educating Rita
Encyclopedia
Educating Rita is a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell. It is a play for two actors set entirely in the office of an Open University
Open University
The Open University is a distance learning and research university founded by Royal Charter in the United Kingdom...

 lecturer.

Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...

, Educating Rita premièred at The Warehouse
Donmar Warehouse
Donmar Warehouse is a small not-for-profit theatre in the Covent Garden area of London, with a capacity of 251.-About:Under the artistic leadership of Michael Grandage, the theatre has presented some of London’s most memorable award-winning theatrical experiences, as well as garnered critical...

, London, in June 1980 starring Julie Walters
Julie Walters
Julie Walters, CBE is an English actress and novelist. She came to international prominence in 1983 for Educating Rita, performing in the title role opposite Michael Caine. It was a role she had created on the West End stage and it won her BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for Best Actress...

 and Mark Kingston
Mark Kingston
Mark Kingston was an English actor who made many television and stage appearances over his 50 year career....

. The play was directed by Mike Ockrent
Mike Ockrent
Mike Ockrent was a British stage director, well-known both for his Broadway musicals and smaller niche plays. He was educated at Highgate School. Through directing Educating Rita and Follies, he became an established figure in London theatre...

.

Plot summary

The play follows the relationship between a young Liverpudlian working-class hairdresser and Dr. Frank Bryant, a middle-aged university lecturer, during the course of a year.

Susan (who initially calls herself Rita), dissatisfied with the routine of her work and social life, seeks inner growth by signing up for and attending an Open University course in English Literature. The play opens as 'Rita' meets her tutor, Frank, for the first time. Dr Frank Bryant is a middle-aged, alcoholic career academic who has taken on the tutorship to pay for his drink. The two have an immediate and profound effect on one another; Frank is impressed by Susan's verve and earnestness and is forced to re-examine his attitudes and position in life; Susan finds Frank's tutelage opens doors to a bohemian lifestyle and a new self-confidence. However, Frank's bitterness and cynicism return as he notices Susan beginning to adopt the pretensions of the university culture he despises. Susan becomes disillusioned by a friend's attempted suicide and realises that her new social niche is rife with the same dishonesty and superficiality she had previously sought to escape. The play ends as Frank, sent to Australia on a sabbatical, welcomes the possibilities of the change.

Themes

The play deals with the concept of freedom, change, England's class system, the shortcomings of institutional education, and the nature of self-development and of personal relationships. The play borrows from the George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

 play Pygmalion
Pygmalion (play)
Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of...

, itself based upon archetypes from Greek myth
Pygmalion (mythology)
Pygmalion is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton, he is most familiar from Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.-In Ovid:In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a...

.

Film adaptation

The play was adapted by Russell for a 1983 film with Michael Caine
Michael Caine
Sir Michael Caine, CBE is an English actor. He won Academy Awards for best supporting actor in both Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules ....

 and Julie Walters
Julie Walters
Julie Walters, CBE is an English actress and novelist. She came to international prominence in 1983 for Educating Rita, performing in the title role opposite Michael Caine. It was a role she had created on the West End stage and it won her BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for Best Actress...

, directed by Lewis Gilbert
Lewis Gilbert
Lewis Gilbert CBE is an English film director, producer and screenwriter.-Early life:He was the son of music hall performers, and spent his early years travelling with his parents, and watching the shows from the side of the stage. He first performed on-stage at the age of 5, when asked to drive a...

.

Radio adaptation

The play was adapted by Russell for radio in 2009 – see Educating Rita (radio play). It starred Bill Nighy
Bill Nighy
William Francis "Bill" Nighy is an English actor and comedian. He worked in theatre and television before his first cinema role in 1981, and made his name in television with The Men's Room in 1991, in which he played the womanizer Prof...

 and Laura Dos Santos directed by Kirsty Williams
Kirsty Williams (drama)
Kirsty Williams is a radio drama director and producer for BBC Radio Drama at Pacific Quay, Glasgow.Her play Daniel and Mary received a Bronze Sony Radio Academy Award for Best Drama in 2010.-Radio Plays:Notes:-References:...

, and was a 90 minute play broadcast on BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...

 on Boxing Day
Boxing Day
Boxing Day is a bank or public holiday that occurs on 26 December, or the first or second weekday after Christmas Day, depending on national or regional laws. It is observed in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and some other Commonwealth nations. In Ireland, it is recognized as...

 2009.

Revivals

From 26 March - 8 May 2010, as part of the Willy Russell season at the Menier Chocolate Factory
Menier Chocolate Factory
The Menier Chocolate Factory is an award-winning 180 seat fringe studio theatre, restaurant and gallery. It is located in a former 1870s Menier Chocolate Company factory in Southwark Street, a major street in the London Borough of Southwark, central south London, England. The theatre stages plays...

, Laura Dos Santos reprises her radio performance, on stage as Rita alongside Larry Lamb
Larry Lamb (actor)
Lawrence Douglas "Larry" Lamb is an English actor who has worked frequently in television. He is best known for playing one of the greatest villains of British soap Archie Mitchell in the BBC television soap EastEnders, Michael Shipman in the BBC television show Gavin & Stacey and Mischievous...

 as Frank. This is the production's first London West End revival.
This production transferred to the Trafalgar Studios
Trafalgar Studios
Trafalgar Studios, formerly The Whitehall Theatre until 2004, is a West End theatre in Whitehall, near Trafalgar Square, in the City of Westminster, London....

 in London's West End from 8 July - 30 October 2010, produced by Sonia Friedman
Sonia Friedman
Sonia Friedman is a prolific British West End and Broadway theatre producer. She is the younger sister of actress Maria Friedman.-Biography and career:...

. Laura Dos Santos reprised her radio and Menier Chocolate Factory performance as Rita, and Frank was played by veteran actor Tim Pigott-Smith
Tim Pigott-Smith
Tim Pigott-Smith is an English film and television actor.-Early life:Pigott-Smith was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, the son of Margaret Muriel and Harry Thomas Pigott-Smith, who was a journalist. He was educated at Wyggeston Boys' School, Leicester, King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon, and...

. Like the Willy Russell season at the Menier Chocolate Factory, the production ran in repertory
Repertory
Repertory or rep, also called stock in the United States, is a term used in Western theatre and opera.A repertory theatre can be a theatre in which a resident company presents works from a specified repertoire, usually in alternation or rotation...

 alongside Shirley Valentine
Shirley Valentine
Shirley Valentine is a one-character play by Willy Russell. Taking the form of a monologue by a middle-aged, working class Liverpool housewife, it focuses on her life before and after a transforming holiday abroad.-Plot:...

starring Meera Syal
Meera Syal
Meera Syal MBE is a British comedienne, writer, playwright, singer, journalist, producer and actress. She rose to prominence as one of the team that created Goodness Gracious Me and became one of the UK's best-known Indian personalities portraying Sanjeev's grandmother, Ummi, in The Kumars at No...

.

Influence

Geoffrey Sampson
Geoffrey Sampson
Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex....

 explains the title of his 1997 book, Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate
Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate
Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate is a book by Geoffrey Sampson, providing arguments against Noam Chomsky's theory of a human instinct for language acquisition. Sampson explains the original title of the book as a deliberate allusion to Educating Rita , and uses the plot of that play...

, as a deliberate allusion to Educating Rita.

See also

  • Galatea
    Galatea (mythology)
    -Name "Galatea":Though the name "Galatea" has become so firmly associated with Pygmalion's statue as to seem antique, its use in connection with Pygmalion originated with a post-classical writer. No extant ancient text mentions the statue's name...

     of Greek mythology
  • My Fair Lady
    My Fair Lady
    My Fair Lady is a musical based upon George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe...

  • Pretty Woman
    Pretty Woman
    Pretty Woman is a 1990 romantic comedy film set in Los Angeles, California. Written by J.F. Lawton and directed by Garry Marshall, this motion picture features Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, and also Hector Elizondo, Ralph Bellamy, and Jason Alexander in supporting roles. Roberts played the only...


External links

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