Educating Rita by Willy Russell, HIT Productions
Where and When: Touring Victoria, 2007
Reviewer: Kate Herbert on June 26, 2007
You might recall the movie version of Willy Russell’s play, Educating Rita, with Julie Walters and Michael Caine, that was faithful to his stage play.
Rita (Lisa Chappell) is a brassy, 26-year-old Liverpool hairdresser who aspires to an education. She seeks this in an Open University literature program taught by Frank (David Downer), a jaded, boozing university professor who abandoned his career as a poet and now seeks solace in a whisky bottle.
Rita is a product of her working class environment but chooses not to be a victim of her educational deprivation despite the overt hostility of her husband to her studies. Chappell, who some might recognise from McLeod’s Daughters, competently plays the demanding Liverpudlian with a blend of chattering anxiety, good cheer and brazenness.
The narrative of Russell’s witty play unfolds in a series of weekly tutorials in Frank’s messy office. Over a period of months Rita is transformed from a blathering but lovable twit with no taste and bad hair into an intellectual young woman with confident opinions on a range of literary subjects and an understanding of culture for which she hungers.
Downer is credible and commendable as Frank, playing him with a shambolic and dejected quality. Frank’s loss of direction and motivation in his teaching is revitalised as he coaches Rita in her quest for learning. What is surprising for us and for Rita is that, unlike Henry Higgins with Eliza Doolittle, he is not proud of his creation. Rather, he resents her changing and wants to recapture the gauche, clueless but engaging Rita he first met.
Director, Jennifer Hagan, allows the relationship between the characters to be the focus of the production and keeps the action swift and the dialogue playful.
Good teachers are hard to find and Frank very successfully provides Rita with the education, and hence the social power, that she craves. Rita’s rise from obscurity is paralleled inversely by Frank’s descent into the bottle and his banishment, on university sabbatical, to Australia.
The play, written in the early 1980s, encourages a dialogue about education, culture, social status and about what personal traits are valued in our community. Russell’s script is riddled with literary references and jokes although it is not necessary to know the allusions to understand the play. The production is warm and funny, providing an entertaining night out.
By Kate Herbert
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