Educating Rita (Modern Classics)

Product Information

This was a lovely book that I read in about one hour. It filled me with joy and sympathy for the characters, and I truly enjoyed the short time I had with it! REVIEW: 'John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert' - Original London Cast" castalbums.org, 31 May 2016 Rita continues spending time with her new group of friends, including a man called Tiger, of whom Frank is jealous. She also stops working at the hair salon, instead taking on a waitressing job at a bistro. Frank, for his part, starts drinking more than normal, feeling like Rita doesn’t want to study with him. She points out that she would probably enjoy coming to his tutorials more if he wasn’t always drinking so much, and this sparks an argument, at the end of which Frank thrusts a pile of his own poetry into her arms and tells her to write an essay about his work.

It wasa big character change for me up until that point I’d been playing Michael Caine-ish in everything.The most extraordinary thing about that role for me was that I could find nothing of myself in it.He was the farthest away from myself I’d ever been with a character, which is the ideal place for an actor to be.Julie Walters really helped me look good. She’d never done a movie before.She’d done the play, so she was very into the characters, but I thought she played down, into the style of film acting, just beautifully. A lot of theatre actors would have gone over the top with it” Willy Russell's first novel, The Wrong Boy, was published in 2000. Russell has provided the musical scores for the feature films, Shirley Valentine, Dancin' Thru The Dark and Mr Love, as well as for the TV series Connie and the television play Terraces. Willy Russell released his first album, Hoovering the Moon, in 2003. The Willy Russell archive FRANK (breaking away slightly) Of course he failed. You see, a clever answer is not necessarily the correct answer. Frank is a perfect foe: a professor and has-been poet, who has more interest in the contents of the whiskey bottles than the contents of the books that line his office shelves, and behind which he stashes the drink. He’s cynical and has taken this special student only for the money.

Willy Russell is a playwright and musician whose work has enjoyed worldwide success and acclaim.He is best known for plays Educating Rita (1980), Shirley Valentine (1986), Our Day Out (1977) and the musical Blood Brothers (1983). Willy Russell’s works have been translated intonumerous languages and won multiple awards for both theatre and film. When romance develops between Captain Tempest and Miranda, the ship’s chef ,Cookie, also falls for her, prompting the inevitable Why Must I Be A Teenager in Love? Poor Prospero has to cope with these men pursing his daughter. But that’s not the only sub-plot. Prospero’s ex-wife Gloria makes a bold case for the need to have more women in space. Her big song? It’s A Man’s World. Groovy, or what? The next lesson, Rita does not have her essay, which annoys Frank. Rita reveals Denny burned all her things though out of anger because she is changing and trying to improve herself. Denny feels scared and betrayed by her changes, and believes that they already have choices. Rita feels trapped by what he thinks are choices, however, saying that they aren’t real choices. RITA I'm a freak. I can't talk to the people I live with anymore. An' I can't talk to the likes of them on Saturday, or them out there, because I can't learn the language. I'm a half-caste. I don't wanna spend the night takin' the piss, comin' on with the funnies because that's the only way I can get into conversation. I didn't want to come to your house just to play the court jester."

Tompkinson uses the wind’s buffetings to intensify our impression that Frank is flailing desperately to take control of his job, his love life and his drinking; that, as a poet, he is trapped under the weight of his own defeated expectations. Taking a tight grip on her coat, Johnson guides it along the air current and loops it firmly on to a hook, her gesture emphasising Rita’s determination not to be dictated to by circumstances, to take charge of her life. The Wrong Boy, Willy Russell's first novel, was published in 2000. [ citation needed] In 2004, Russell returned to his original singer/songwriter roots, releasing his album, Hoovering the Moon on Pure Records. Russell also co-produced the Tim Firth album Harmless Flirting. [ citation needed] My favorite thing about the whole play is, by far, the character of Rita. She is so loveable and endearing, and by the end I felt truly proud of her and her character development. She is determined, unapologetic, self-aware, and she almost never falls prey to the idea of settling for the life she is expected to lead. It never fails to amaze me how playwrights manage to create such well-rounded characters just through the use of dialogue.

LJMU Special Collections and Archives Catalogue

While working as a teacher, Willy Russell continued to write for the theatre and for television. He produced several television dramas for the BBC, including Our Day Out, which was first broadcast in 1977. Much of his early theatre work was produced at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, including: Willy Russell's twist on Pygmalion still works as well as it ever did on stage, as this worthwhile and entertaining production shows, so surely the time is ripe for some more revivals from the Russell canon other than the slightly tired touring production of Blood Brothers. RITA He hates me comin' here. It's like drug addicts, isn't it? They hate it when one of them tries to break away. It makes me stronger comin' here. That's what Denny's frightened of.

As the comedy calms and the drama sets in, the actors build a chemistry that contains more intellectual tensions to become a better, deeper, play with an almost painful tenderness between them by the end. Russell has also written television projects, including the one-off drama, Our Day Out, which aired in 1977. He penned another television drama, One Summer, which aired as a five-part series on Channel 4 in 1983, starring a young David Morrissey. FRANK Found a culture have you, Rita? Found a better song to sing have you? No-you've found a different song, that's all-and on your lips it's shrill and hollow and tuneless. Oh, Rita, Rita... Philip Bretherton's Frank at times gets the character just about spot on, but it isn't a consistent portrayal yet, with some less believable moments and a disturbing habit of staring pointedly at his co-star sometimes when she is talking. However Gillian Kearney is absolutely spot on at all times with a Rita that isn't as loud and coarse initially as she is sometimes played but she makes it work and is completely believable and compelling at all times.

Get in touch

Tompkinson sensitively distils the mid-life angst of the professor and his barely expressed, quietly possessive yearning for Rita, and while Johnson appears a little too ebullient as Rita at the start, her performance fills out and becomes more emotionally astute as she resists a romantic ending to become her own, liberated, woman. I cant think of any figure in my life who influenced Frank. He’s a sort of straight-out-of-the-air creation but he does share again the thing that a number of characters have in the plays of being, to my mind, a real teacher, ie he provides the space and the stimulus in which somebody can securely learn and that’s what he does for Rita. And the other thing is, don’t forget that working in Frank’s voice, I was able to write a lot of things in a certain way that I couldn’t perhaps write in other idioms, in other accents. There are certain ways of thinking that an ‘educated’ man will have, that I was able to deal with for the first time in a play, most of which I share. In a way you can see Rita and Frank as two sides of Willy Russell” As Rita’s second semester progresses, she starts spending time with a group of new friends. This group is made up of students who go to the university and are the kind of intellectual company she has always wanted to keep. Around this time, Denny discovers she has been secretly taking birth control. When he gives her an ultimatum to either stop getting an education or move out, she finally decides to leave him. She then moves in with a cultured and educated young woman named Trish. As she gains independence, her mentor-pupil relationship with Frank suffers. When she writes an essay about a Blake poem that doesn’t align with his academic views, he disparages her work, saying she has left behind her unique way of looking at the world. She tries to tell him that she can have her own ideas and that she doesn’t have to agree with everything he says, but he merely says, “Be careful,” upholding that she has taken on the identity of an elite academic at the expense of her own personality. When she asks why he wants her to be careful, he says, “Because I care for you.” Willy Russell". queens-theatre.co.uk. 2011. Archived from the original on 16 July 2011 . Retrieved 22 July 2011. Frank's bitterness and cynicism return as he notices Susan beginning to adopt the pretensions of the university culture he despises. Susan becomes disillusioned by a friend's attempted suicide and realises that her new social niche is rife with the same dishonesty and superficiality she had previously sought to escape. The film ends as Frank, sent to Australia on a sabbatical, welcomes the possibilities of the change.

For popular comedies that always seem to sell well when they do appear, it's surprising that we don't see professional revivals of Willy Russell's plays very often at all. Alongside further stage works, One for the Road (1976) [9] and Stags and Hens (1978), Russell was a screenwriter with television films, Death of A Young Young Man (1975, BBC1), [10] Daughters of Albion (1979), [11] Our Day Out (1977) [12] and the five-part serial One Summer (1983). [13] Rita asks Frank if he is married, and he says that he was once. As they continue their lessons, Franks world-weariness begins to show, and he is more down than up. He says that he wouldn’t hide so much from his girlfriend if she were more like Rita. Rita doesn’t take these comments seriously. Instead, she laughs them off.Like Rita, Russell had become a hairdresser after leaving school when he was 15, and his story of the sort of social mobility that is less likely to happen these days was closer to home than even Russell recognised. An eight-strong cast brings a boisterous energy to the series of increasingly frenetic situations of mistaken identity set off by the arrival in Ephesus of Antipholus and his servant, Dromio. Unknown to them – or to anyone else – the city is home to each of their long-lost, identical siblings, also master and servant and also called Antipholus and Dromio. Making no pretence at a fourth wall, the performers share everything directly with the happily involved spectators, only concealing, until the final scene, the secret of the uncanny resemblances between the twin-pair actors. Great fun.