educating rita review

Rita is shown to be a bright, bubbly person in act 1 scene1, she is also seen to be very forward and in her speech ‘well its no good always meaning to… one day you wont be able to get out in the poor sod wont be able to get in.’ Rita fixes the problem with the door at the start of act 1 scene 2 ‘ just oilin’ it for y’ … I know you wouldn’t get round to it.’ This shows that Rita is proactive and during all the she never sits down enquires about everything in the room ‘that’s a nice picture, isn’t it?’ this shows that she is very restless and is very curios, there is also a bit of an innocence about her, she says thing that are out of place in the study but Rita barley seems to care for the rules also showing she is informal ‘ there’s no suppose about it look at those tits… so you turn it off and say “ that’s fucking rubbish”.’ She also doesn’t seem to like well with her ‘fellow’ students of the normal university, she sees herself as a cheat using the OU to get her degrees ‘degrees for dishwashers.’  Using the OU, Rita hopes to find herself and gain a new life out of it.  Unlike Frank, Rita is uneducated, when frank speaks of the poet ‘Yeates’ Rita think of winelodge. Being a hairdresser, Rita comes under the working class banner.

There are many dramatic devices in the play explaining the characters meanings and life in the play. One such dramatic device is the door, the door shows the difficulty for Rita to enter the formal world of Franks study and also Franks unableness to join reality from his own little world behind the door, Rita oiling the door shows Rita’s efforts to get into the middle class society and to help Frank escape his social prison in the university. Rita sees the window, another dramatic device, as a porthole to an educated world seeing the student talking on the grass below. The fact Frank does not notice the window shows that unless he changes he cannot find a goal.  The study maybe Franks social prison but it is a goal for Rita to have a study like Franks to show the world she is educated, Frank feels that the room is boring as it has not changed since he has had it. The whiskey is frank hiding place, just like he hides the fact that he drinks behind the books in his study.

The themes of the play are the characters views on education, Rita views education as a gift and that she is lucky to have gained a placement on the OU, and that this will give her a new life. Frank on the other hand takes his education for granted and drinks it away, and that it is a waste of time getting an education.

The title educating Rita is an ambiguous one, it could mean one or both of two things the fact that someone is educating Rita or that Rita is the one actually teaching someone, as the tagline for the film goes; the more Rita loves to learn, the Frank learns to love.

Frank and Rita are so different it is unbelievable, frank is so old and boring and Rita young and bubbly. Then the difference in class and jobs, frank being a middleclass teacher and Rita a working class hairdresser. Even though the difference are huge they are closer than they think, during the course of the play frank and Rita both go through break ups and then they both try to turn theirs lives around, Frank moving to Australia and Rita fulfilling her dreams and getting an education.

I think the opening was a great way of introducing the main themes and characters to the audience in this play.