Educating Rita-Willy Russel.

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English Coursework

Educating Rita-Willy Russel

Educating Rita by Willy Russel illustrates a series of issues. It explains what Rita’s school life was like in early schooling and how she wants to change that and become a different person in life. Rita, the main character who struggled for an education in early life wants to take herself beyond the working class and commits herself to an Open University course.  She believes in completing her education that she will have “choices” and “lead a better way of life.”

        This play by Willy Russel makes the point that woman in the early seventies wanted to change their way of living and become more independent.

        Rita feels that living a better way of life is being able to have “choices” and to “know everything.”  She goes about this in many different ways.

Rita is a woman in her mid twenties who has a part time job as a hairdresser. She is a woman who wants to be able to associate her life with the middle class culture. She wants to be able to do things that other cultures do, and under stand opera and ballet. She wants to understand other ways of living.   This play explains what Rita goes through to succeed in her passion for doing this and how she develops a close relationship with her tutor Frank at her Open University.        

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This play was written at a time where women were looking for individuality and for ways to lead a more open lifestyle.  Rita is a perfect example of a woman who is trying to reach this difficult ambition.  She “wants to find out about herself” and see what sort of person she is.

In her early education, Rita was at a school that was not very good, it was “borin” and there was “knives and fights. Rita wanted to learn, but that was not allowed.  This is because she would have become different from all her mates, which was not ...

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