EDUCATING RITA
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Educating Rita is one of Willy Russell’s best known plays, drawing on every emotion to produce a profoundly moving, yet also hilarious two-hander. It is a witty yet poignant look at a working class woman’s attempts to change her social circumstances through pursuit of an Open University qualification, a play about education and choice. Set in the chaotic splendour of a university lecturer’s study/tutorial room, the play’s two characters share a language but each speak a very different tongue. The play follows Liverpool hairdresser, Rita, and her experience in returning to education.
Tutor, and failed poet, Frank, is initially reluctant to take on the enormity of trying to teach this needy but unconventional and unfocused would-be student, preferring instead to continue easing his way through his teaching duties with the blunting help of the booze he keeps stashed behind the books on his shelves. For Rita, though, Frank is the perfect teacher and faced with her determination, with her insistence that she wants to ‘….know. Everything,’ he is reluctantly persuaded to commit to overseeing Rita’s studies and the series of regular tutorials through which the play unfolds. Tickets on sale from 31st May 2025 Thursday 12th - Saturday 21st September 2024 Written by Willy Russell Directed by Sara Bissett |
