Educating Rita
by Willy Russell

This classic two-hander tells the story of Frank, a professor of literature, and Rita his newest student.

Frank Bryant is a professor of literature and Rita is his newest student.

She’s a hairdresser who thinks Peer Gynt is a new type of perm lotion.

He’s a failed writer who has given up on his life. She’s determined to change hers by getting an education.

Rita embarks on a course of evening classes with Frank as her English tutor. His disillusioned outlook on life has driven him to the bottle.

The effects are both amusing and dramatic as her fresh, intuitive approach becomes clouded and stifled as she grapples with the problem of a formal education, while Frank also learns something - to believe in himself again.

But who ends up teaching who in this comedy about love, learning and finding a better song to sing?

Nicole Rutty as Rita

Willy Russell's classic two-hander gets a straightforward and engaging reading, with the necessary laughs and emotion - The Advertiser

Educating Rita is as fresh today as when British playwright Willy Russell first unveiled it back in 1983 - Sunday Mail

Dave Simms, as Frank, is fantastic. Nicole Rutty, as Rita, shows exactly the right mix of bravado and vulnerability - Adelaide Theatre Guide.

Originally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK.

Educating Rita was first performed at the Warehouse in June 1980 and then transferred to the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End where it ran for two and a half years. Productions have been staged all over the world ever since.

Educating Rita swept the board and won multiple awards for best comedy and best play. It was later made into a OSCAR nominated and BAFTA winning movie starring Julie Walters and Michael Caine. (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress).

Director's notes

Educating Rita is an incredibly rich text and a rewarding play to direct and work on.

It is funny, tragic, serious and rude, all within the space of a page.

For those who love English Literature it is a delight to unpack the references and see where they go. But, if you’ve never read a poem by Eliot or seen a Shakespeare play and think Peer Gynt would make a good name for a perm lotion, you’ll still love this play.

For me, Educating Rita is in many ways a trip down memory lane. It has taken me straight back to being 18 and going off to University to study English and Drama. I can still remember, like well-known tunes, the works I studied.
I also have a good collection of Open University study guides. I found them useful for getting me through the
“proper” university and also for helping me to teach Year 11 and 12 English when I graduated.

Frank is a tragic hero. He is the Macbeth, the hero who is warned continually to cut back on his drinking and change his lifestyle. One is tempted, like Rita when she attends a performance of Macbeth, to call out and warn him. But somehow one knows that his character has a fatal flaw in it, rather like J. Alfred Prufrock, the anti-hero of TS Eliot’s poem. Like J. Alfred, Frank is paralysed and condemned to continual inaction, which sets up the dramatic tension between himself and Rita, who is not a character who sits around much.

She is the heroine, the Peer Gynt character who sets out to find herself, braving trolls and disaster on the way, but in the end comes happily home.

At times she does become the monster of Frank’s
design, another boring clone of the University exam system, not thinking creatively and freely any more.
But at the end, she does have choice.Choice is ultimately what this play is about, the choices that a good education can give you. The way in which education can help you organise your thoughts, articulate your ideas and decide for yourself what you will do rather than being forced to follow a path that you would rather not.

It is having the ability to choose the song you will sing.

When we were choosing our plays for 2007 Dave and I read and reread play after play, but when I picked up Educating Rita, it was like coming home. It was fresh, funny and warm; it made me laugh and it made me want to cry. I wanted to hug Rita and shake Frank.

The arguments in the play are current today: the effect of materialism on society, the poverty in so many
educational settings, the idea that choice is about being able to choose between eight types of lager and the exercise of one’s own power as opposed to being subjected to another’s.I finished reading the play and for us both the choice was made.

It has been a joy to work with Nicky and Dave.They are both such consummate actors that rehearsals have not so much been about directing the action but guiding the
conversations and using an external eye to balance the movement.

I thank them and Alison for their professionalism and for the fun we have had.

Julie Walters and Michael Caine in the movie version

'Simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious' - Sunday Times

'As full of regret as it is of promise ... the deft moments of its comedy are splendidly refreshing' - The Times

Willy Russell was born in Liverpool in 1947.

He became a hairdresser on leaving school, then undertook a variety of jobs, also writing songs which were performed in local folk clubs. He also wrote songs and sketches for local radio programmes. At 20 years of age, he returned to college and became a teacher in Toxteth, after which he began to become interested in writing drama.

His first play, Keep your Eyes Down, was produced in 1971, and he became well-known after his musical about the Beatles, John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert, ran for eight weeks at Liverpool Everyman Theatre. It was transferred to the West End and won the Evening Standard and London Theatre Critic Award for best musical in 1974.

Since then he has written several plays, including Educating Rita (1981), about a working-class woman who decides to study English with the Open University and Shirley Valentine (1988), a housewife who becomes transformed after a holiday in Greece. Both plays were made into films from Willy Russell’s own screenplays starring Julie Walters and Pauline Collins respectively, each winning an Oscar nomination, as did the author for best screenplay. He has also written plays for television, including the well-received Our Day Out (1984).

Willy Russell has continued to write songs since the early 1960s. He wrote the lyrics and score for his popular musical Blood Brothers (1986), about a pair of twins separated at birth. The show has been playing in the West End since 1983 and won 3 Best Music Award and one Best Actress Award at the Laurence Olivier Awards. He also wrote the score for Shirley Valentine, and for several other television series and plays. His first album, Hoovering the Moon, was released in 2003.

In 2000, Willy Russell published his first novel, The Wrong Boy. It is currently being adapted for television. He lives and works in Liverpool.