Educating Rita 40 years on – few plays have enjoyed such a rich afterlife
Educating Rita, Willy Russell’s great, wise play about the value of education and class, is now 40 years old. Somehow, this anniversary seems momentous, in that few works on the same subject have ever worked quite so well, or enjoyed such a rich afterlife. It famously launched Julie Walters’ career, when she created the character of Rita, and made for an excellent film, with her and Michael Caine as her reluctant mentor, and has continued to be a stalwart of professional and rep theatre alike.
In its new touring revival by Max Roberts and Theatre by the Lake, there has been no attempt to modernise it, no ham-fisted insertion of references to social media or iPhones or #MeToo. All of this is just as well, as attempting to update Russell’s play would be fraught with difficulty. Instead, the dynamic remains the same. Frank is a middle-aged alcoholic English lecturer, struggling to summon up the slightest enthusiasm for his subject and depressed by his failed career as a poet. He takes on Rita, a quick-witted but unpolished hairdresser, who wishes to study literature via the Open University. The dynamic between the two of them shifts over the course of the play, moving from tutor and student, through an odd-couple friendship, to something quite different by the close.
It is a hard play to do particularly well, although relatively easy to offer an undemanding and straightforward account of. Russell owes a significant debt to Shaw’s Pygmalion (or, if you will, My Fair Lady), but David Mamet’s later play Oleanna, a considerably harsher and nastier work about the power relationship between a male tutor and a female student, probably has more to say about what happens – or goes wrong – in the intimate setting of an educational institution. And, of course, Alan Bennett’s The History Boys offers a starry-eyed view of the wonders and privileges of teaching, which Russell’s Frank (he has no surname) does not. He is more interested in the bottles of whisky that adorn his (surprisingly palatial) office in Patrick Connellan’s excellent stage design, lurking behind the volumes of literature that he half-heartedly teaches his students.
In order for Educating Rita to work, and not simply exist as a quaint period piece, it has to have two superb performances at its centre, and thankfully Roberts’s staging has two great actors. Stephen Tompkinson has been giving excellent performances for many years now, and he inhabits the role of the boozy, arrogant lecturer with aplomb, helped by a perfect choice of costume design, courtesy of Sam Newland; the creased corduroy jacket, the shabby shirt, the askew tie, the seen-better-days chinos. In Frank’s great drunk scene in the second half – there are echoes of Jim Dixon’s “Merry England” farrago from Lucky Jim, which coincidentally Tompkinson once appeared in – he shows a great flair for physical comedy, but also conveys a sense of a life utterly wasted, as he alternates between patronising superiority and poignant regret.
He is matched by Jessica Johnson as Rita, who arguably has a much harder part, and not simply because of the endless costume changes that chart her growth and development as a character. As written, she is not just the Eliza Doolittle figure of the smart but uneducated ingénue, but something more complex – there is a wonderful moment, beautifully played by Johnson, when she talks of her sadness at being unable to join in a pub singalong with her family and friends because she no longer can find the simple satisfaction in run-of-the-mill pleasures that she used to. Amidst the jokes about Peer Gynt (something of a go-to for dramatic ridicule, as anyone who enjoyed the references to it in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter will know) and EM Forster, there is a real sadness in this particular account of a pedagogic relationship, platonic though it remains. There is just the right touch of affection and longing between the two of them, delicately handled by both actors, and the gradual evolution of their friendship is entirely convincing.
The play can be accused of being dated. There is absolutely no way that a man like Frank would ever be allowed to teach in any university these days, let alone invite his student to his house for dinner, and the current argot of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘cancellations’ would ensure that a contemporary Rita would not last beyond its first scene. A more serious issue is that Russell’s drama fits snugly into the confines of the well-made play, rather than allowing difficult or challenging subtext to emerge, and Roberts’ staging does nothing to challenge this. There are subtle political points to be made, revolving around the way in which university education can stifle as well as emancipate, but they are only made obliquely here, if at all.
Nonetheless, this is a splendidly entertaining evening out, and certainly the best recent production of the play (which was staged with Lenny Henry at Chichester in 2015 and at Liverpool the same year). The jokes alternate between the profound and the sitcom-level (Rita thinks that Yeats is the name of a wine lodge) but there is a sadness and melancholy to this particular educational study that edifies as much as it entertains.