How does Rita Change from Act 1 to Act 2 and what techniques does Willy Russell use to help illustrate these changes?
In the play ‘Educating Rita’ by Willy Russell we are presented with Rita, a very ‘in your face’ character. During the play she undergoes a lot of changes. She was a Working class woman desperate to learn. So desperate in fact that she forgets about everything else. At her age a working class woman at that time would be expected to have settled down and had a baby but Rita wants more than that, she wants a better life than what she has, doesn’t want to be normal like everyone else. But in doing this she does more than get educated; she changes in almost every way and even leaves her husband. This shows how dedicated she is to her education as she won’t let anything stop her.
When we first meet Rita she struggles to even enter the room, which could represent her difficulty to enter the world of education. From the moment she enters it is clear that she is uncomfortable and very inquisitive, always asking questions, ‘What am?’ ‘What?’ ‘I'm a what?’ ‘That’s a nice picture isn’t it?’ and quite a lot more. This shows that she is uncomfortable and that she is perhaps trying to avoid giving Frank a chance to start teaching her properly, as if although she wants to be there she is unsure if it is the right thing to do and wants to postpone it. It is also very clear that she is very nervous as she can not stop moving around, suggesting that she is agitated, she ‘inspects a book case’ then ‘goes to her bag and rummages in it’ then ‘goes to the bookcase’ again. This shows that she feels uncomfortable and agitated. We know that she is very keen to learn but she is not confident in what she does and thinks she doesn’t deserve to fit in with the upper classes. This is seen when she is invited to a dinner party at franks but thinks she has ‘brought the wrong sort of wine’. This shows how she thinks she isn’t sophisticated enough and that she expects to be judged as unworthy because she doesn’t know what type of wine to buy. We also know from this scene that she is unhappy being how she is, Frank wants her to go in and be herself ‘someone who’s funny, delightful, charming’ but Rita doesn’t want to be ‘charming and delightful; funny. What’s funny? I don’t wanna be funny I wanna talk seriously with the rest of you.’ This shows how she doesn’t see working class funny as a real asset; she feels she could do so much better even though frank is confident she would have been fine. She wants to be taken as a serious individual, not as a ‘jester’. She starts to change in act 1 as we know that her relationship with her husband Denny starts to deteriorate drastically. He is unhappy with her studying and even burns her books at one point. This leads Rita to make the decision to leave him which marks a whole new point in her life. As it shows her independence and growing confidence.
