Educating Rita -review- Theatre Royal Newcastle

 Educating Rita

Theatre Royal

Newcastle upon Tyne 

Fri 17th September 

“Last night, last night I went to the theatre – a proper one, a professional theatre… I thought it was gonna be dead boring, but it wasn’t, it was brilliant!”

The sharp-eyed among you might recognise this as a meta-textual reference, a quote from Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, and also a comment on the actual experience of going to the theatre. In this case, Newcastle Theatre Royal, a proper professional theatre, with curtains and dress circle and plaster mouldings. Dead proper, dead meta.

It was brilliant. I wasn’t expecting it to be boring – why would I go? it makes no sense – but I did think it would be familiar, comforting like an old coat – and don’t we all need comfort at the moment?

I saw the film of the play when it first came out, in the early 1980s, with Julie Walters as the titular Rita, and Michael Caine as Frank, her lecturer. So the plot set-up was familiar. But the difference was striking. This is what live theatre does best. Think of the million different stagings of the same Shakespeare play. 

My memory of the film was of a heart-warming comedy. This felt darker, sadder. As Rita says about Chekhov’s The Seagull: it’s so sad and all these people are calling it a comedy. (Another bit of intertextuality.) I don’t know how much of the difference is down to the different emphases between theatre and film, the 40 years’ shift in perspective, or just the unreliability of memory.

Forty years ago, I was closer in age to Rita than Frank, and I shared her social predicament: I was a single mum on a council estate, whose neighbours thought I was weird because I didn’t share their interests. I was passionately interested in culture but felt excluded and looked down upon by the gate-keepers of elitist arts. The intervening years have made me more of a Frank.

The plot, for the benefit of those not alive in the ‘80s: Frank is a washed-up, functioning alcoholic, university lecturer who takes on Open University teaching to subsidise his heavy drinking and his impending divorce. Rita is working class woman who feels trapped in her social position (she’s a hairdresser, married to a man who doesn’t understand her ambitions) and wants to use education to better herself. The play’s scenes all take place in Frank’s room and chart the changing balance of power within the pair’s relationship.

We meet Rita first as a wildly enthusiastic, mouthy but eager to learn, naïve OU student and Frank as her reluctant teacher. He is gradually won round by her cheeky charm, original mind, and sheer persistence. 

Rita’s new-found independence clashes with her husband’s limited horizons and she leaves him, takes up with ‘proper’ students and moves into a flat with one of them, even emulating her posh accent. Frank, like Dr Frankenstein, is appalled at the monster he has created. Rita has lost her refreshing originality and is now writing essays like all the other academically brainwashed students. There is also a hint that maybe Frank was using Rita as a distraction from his own sense of meaninglessness, and now she is no longer dependent on him, he is angry at again facing the abyss.

The final scene, a sort of parting, a sort of reconciliation, with Frank being shipped of to Australia after his behaviour becomes too much of an embarrassment to his employers, is poignant. Rita doesn’t need him anymore, but she is genuinely grateful for what he’s given her. The closing moment is the same as the film’s: “Come here. I’m going to take ten years off of you.”

Curtain. Standing ovation. (This is after all a proper, professional theatre.)

Jessica Johnson’s portrayal of Rita is spikier than Julie Walters’ in the film; and Stephen Tompkinson’s Frank emphasises the bleakness at its heart, in contrast to Michael Caine’s roguish charm. But to my mind, and possibly in my ‘Frank’ stage of life, this grittier production feels more real, and in a perverse way more uplifting than the sunnier tone of the film. There’s no guarantee everything will go well but we, like Rita, do have a choice.

When I stood up to applaud, it was not just theatrical convention. It was an evening well spent, and left me pondering for a long time after.

Gerry Byrne