Educating Rita by Willy Russell at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast

Educating Rita by Willy Russell at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 4^th of March, 2016

Directed by Emma Jordan

Starring Michael James Ford as Frank

And Kerri Quinn as Rita

This chalk and cheese drama details the relationship between an alcoholic Professor of English and his Open University student, Rita.  He is an all washed up alcoholic drifting between whisky-fuelled remorse, a relationship with wife Julia seemingly on the rocks and his albeit reluctant attempts to re-make a woman after his own image.  The play’s obvious antecedents are John Milton’s Paradise Lost (God’s creation of man and woman and the account of the Fall.), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (man becoming God through creation of new life.  This becomes a monster since created in the image of a ‘fallen’ creature.), George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (a Professor’s attempt to create an upper class woman from a Covent Garden flower seller thus demonstrating that class is as tangible and profound as are rounded vowels and pronounced aitches).  If anything these all too palpable influences remain unacknowledged and the script seems to strain to point to further texts possibly in order to obviate them but this strategy hardly works.  Frankenstein is covertly acknowledged since the texture of the play and its language could hardly allow any of the above texts to remain unmentioned.

Educating Rita is full of the love of literature as a means to enlightenment but there is also a social critique hidden in the text.  Rita begins as a working-class woman, whose real name is Susan for she has now taken the name of an author of pulp romance novels she admires, who enthuses about the pulp fiction she reads, the child (her husband desires but) she hardly wants, the husband who suspects her visits to a Professor signify much more.  Rita wants to realise herself before she is ready to become a mother.  In short, she feels trapped in a working-class milieu she hates, detests but senses instinctively that there is much more to life.  Rita hardly understands how to go about the necessary yet painful route to self-realisation.  At first the Professor is astonished by her gauche manner and naïve understanding and equivocates but Rita also possesses a fresh, untutored and spontaneous approach to her subject.  The only seeming barrier to their own relationship beginning to flower is his unkempt manner and looks.  Rita works as a hairdresser and quickly realises that the Professor looks much older than he actually is as a consequence of his self-neglect, something she wants to change.  Rita desires change in her life but the Professor, Frank, cannot move forward.  Like Tracey Emin’s criticism of certain artists Frank is ‘Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!’. 

Rita’s personal growth is underlined by her change of clothes after every scene but the tactic seems superficial and trite since Rita announces that there is more to life than buying new dresses.  The booming soundtrack between scenes perhaps indicates a temporal development from Van the Man to the Undertones to Stiff Little Fingers and their Alternative Ulster (which seemed better sung and scored than originally).  The Northern Irish setting offers a further context, indicating that Rita’s situation is a consequence of the times she survives through.  It’s a bit easier to listen to than the (possibly unlistenable to) electronic synthesizer score used in the film version where Michael Caine played Frank and Julie Walter as Rita.   In the film version the characters that Frank and Rita mention in the play are depicted and a good deal of context that the play must ignore make the work more spacious and comprehensible.

The texts they encounter also reveal keys to their own inherent mutual sympathy.  Firstly, Rita picks up Howards End by E.M.Forster.  The Professor points out perhaps to Rita’s chagrin that Forster was an out and out homosexual but their banter foregrounds Rita’s punning attempts to undermine the Professor’s authority.  Sarcasm being the lowest form of wit is Rita’s self-defence mechanism.  Indeed, she often succeeds in getting her points over and ultimately rejects Forster as a consequence of his uncaringness about the poor.  She feels from evidence in the text that Howards End is a novel that seeks to shut out the poor or rather to ignore them.  As the Professor rightly says a legitimate work of literature need not entertain or depict the poor but Rita is ready to instantaneously dismiss Forster and all his works.  Later a phrase from Howards End circles and re-circles, ‘only connect’ declares the Professor quoting Foster yet it seems that the connections between the Professor and Rita hang by a thread or are seemingly impalpable.  Rita’s views can be superficial, just as her submission of an essay on Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt simply noting that it would be best produced as a radio play. 

Rita’s problem is that she cannot bring her work home as a consequence of her husband’s controlling behaviour and she can hardly study at work either.  By this stage of their teacher-student relationship Rita is beginning to find that she is changing but her husband and social context refuses to.  She discovers that education is a means of empowerment, empowerment over her social context and her husband.  Rita’s husband clearly believes that he has her exactly where he wants her but when Rita’s self-esteem begins to rise, her essays and ideas become increasingly sophisticated under the Professors tutelage, and he eventually shows her the door.  Rita goes to live with her mother and now finds that she can be an independent woman in control of her own life and destiny.  She becomes increasingly confident and eventually her visits to the Professor become a hindrance to her own self-development.  She anticipates the poetry of Blake by quoting Blake’s poem The Sick Rose to the Professor who is enthusing about the subject without knowing that Rita encountered the poem at summer school where another teacher introduced her to it.  Rita is anticipating where she once followed in the shadow of the Professor who is now the subject of complaints from his students, a consequence of falling off the lecture stage worse the wear from drink during a lecture.  He shows Rita his own poetry which he then subjects to a damning critique as failed, pretentious, humourless drivel, tearing it to pieces but Rita disagrees.  For her there is something real and driven about the Professor and his poetry bears the same qualities although it may not seem that way to the audience.  Rita’s role is relatively straightforward, her rise and increasingly buoyant existence.  However, the Professors part is more difficult and unattractive since it charts the demise of a man enjoying a brilliant career into a whisky sodden wreck but Michael James Ford carries the role, hardly putting a step wrong.  The part is particularly demanding in a two hander that is also rich in verbal twists and turns, for instance Rita who initially believes that Yeats is a wine lodge and her sarcastic aplomb.  The play is very text driven and this interpretation tends to focus on the text for the mise en scene stays the same througout, only Rita’s change of costume and the music.

Ultimately the Professor is being moved on by the university to a prolonged sabbatical in Australia for two years although its presumed that he will never return.  He proposes that Rita accompany him but she hesitates and eventually obliges her original intentions by giving the Professor a quick trim.  The ending fails to offer the kind of romantic resolution that the bodice rippers and mushy romantic pulp fiction that Rita initially enjoys do but that is perhaps Willy Russell’s point.  It is easier to imagine Rita moving into the Professor’s study after waving him goodbye, then resuming her pursuit of literature and possibly penning better poems than the Professor was ever capable of.  In the end this seems almost to be revenge fiction, a woman getting her own back on the men who oppress her, her husband who has only one thing on his mind and the stuck in a rut Professor.  Anyway it is Rita who is really moving.

Paul Murphy, Belfast