Rita’s mission to discover herself is obscured by her desire to move social class. She aspires to be like Frank, but Russell portrays Frank as a failure, a failed marriage, he spends most of his time drunk, and he is a failed poet. Rita wants, however, just to be able to speak well and understand ballet and poetry, she does not see Frank as a failure because he is her role model.
In the beginning of the play, Russell uses the class difference between Frank and Rita to comical effect. Rita’s common sense and lack of confidence clashes with Frank’s high class and quietness. On page 11 this clash is clearly visible:
‘RITA A Flora man
FRANK Flora? Flowers?
RITA No, Flora, the bleedin’ margarine…’
Here, Frank automatically assumes that Rita is using complicated terminology for flowers, when she is actually talking about something as simple as margarine. Rita’s common sense initially overcomes the class barrier between her and Frank and starts a conversation about Rita’s job in a hairdressing salon.
Throughout the play, Russell uses widely differing methods to question Frank’s, Rita’s and the reader’s attitudes to education. Rita sees education as an escape from lower-class life and a way to broaden her horizons. Frank however, sees it as a necessary thing, which perhaps makes you look at life in a dull way, examining everything, that might be better if just left as it is.
Frank knows that if Rita is to succeed as a literary scholar and improve class, he will have to crush her natural exuberance and effervescence. At the beginning of the play he realises this and tries to get out of teaching her by saying she deserves a better tutor,
‘RITA You’re my tutor.
FRANK But I’ve told you, I don’t want to do it. Why come to me?’
Rita’s persuasive manner, however, keeps her coming weekly to be tutored. The change in Rita over her year at the university is clearly visible when Frank shows her his poetry. She thinks it is ‘dead good’, but he says its crap and asks Rita what she would have thought of it before she became ‘educated’, she agrees that she would have thought it was ‘crap’. They have, it would seem, reversed roles, as Frank now thinks his poetry is rubbish and tears it up, whereas Rita wants him to write more.
As Rita becomes more a part of Middle-class social life, by going to see Shakespeare’s Macbeth etc, Frank is more and more negative towards her, being quiet when Rita is excitedly telling him about the play she went to see, and trying to put her off plays:
‘RITA …I thought it was gonna be dead borin’…
FRANK Then why did you go in the first place?’
At the end of the play, both Rita and Frank have changed dramatically, Rita is more educated and has moved social class, whereas Frank has seemed to lose his class and is being sent to Australia for two years. Russell leaves the reader to decide what we think about each of them. Frank is worried about Rita, he thinks she is ‘singing a different song, not necessarily a better one.’ He feels neglected as Rita is leaving him, like his wife, his career, his poetry and his sobriety.
But by the end of the play, Rita and Frank have reached another level of development simply with each other’s company and both have new horizons in their education.
