Production loses time period references, lessening its impact
Adaptation lacks the class, gender conflicts of original 1980 script
What makes a great teacher? Can you ever teach a true understanding of poetry? These are the questions at the heart of the Arts Club’s somewhat unmemorable new production of the classic English comedy about class and literary classics, Educating Rita.
Drawing on the old myth of Pygmalion, a story that inspired everything from My Fair Lady to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Educating Rita is about an alcoholic upper-crust university lecturer and failed poet named Frank who agrees to tutor an Open University student as a way to fund his boozing.
In his door walks Rita, a sparky 26-year-old hairdresser from Liverpool with an unquenchable thirst for learning. Charmed by her lively presence, Frank goes about teaching her everything he knows about literature, but their relationship sours when she starts to settle into the university culture he despises.
Written for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the show premiered in 1980 before being adapted into a film featuring the inimitable Julie Walters and a heavily bearded Michael Caine.
In the updated version, running on the Granville Island Stage until Oct. 25, playwright Willy Russell has removed most references to the play’s time period, lessening its impact somewhat by divorcing it from the massive social shifts in which its two characters were part of in its original incarnation.
The relationship between class, gender and education in the 1980s in England was in a state of extraordinary turmoil. Rita represented a new generation hungry for knowledge but struggling to find a place in hallowed institutions. Stripping the play in this way leaves Rita’s character without much grounding, an oddly blank slate reading pulp fiction few have heard of and singing drinking songs that go unnamed, while Frank has access to this rich archive of cultural touchstones.
Holly Lewis’ Rita is a bundle of energy, strutting and pouncing around the stage on high-heeled boots. What she lacks is the character’s basic toughness, the down-to-earth quality that drew audiences to Walters in the 1983 film. Lewis’ Liverpudlian accent tends to fall behind the movement, moving into broad vowels when it should be quick and sharp, which gets in the way of the comic timing.
Scott Bellis as Frank tends to be more genial than menacing, making a weird counterpoint to the character’s consistently smug dialogue. It’s hard to tell whether it’s that dissonance or the character’s general unlikeability that makes it difficult to empathize with his descent into drunken ennui.
The trouble may lie in the fact that Frank is given so much of the narrative control when he feels like little more than a caricature of a selfobsessed academic. His digs about his live-in girlfriend’s cooking and Rita’s misunderstandings of the English literary canon earn little in the way of laughter. It will be interesting to see what new layers Ted Cole might bring to the character when he takes over the role tonight.
Like the Arts Club’s recent production of 4000 Miles, Educating Rita is a generally harmless exploration of generational change, but what it lacks is the persistent charm and sharp comedic voice of that other production. It also made me yearn for the return of TES, the much more complex, dark and powerful exploration of class, education and literature in contemporary England performed by poet Steve Larkin at this year’s Fringe Festival.