Outline the changes Rita goes through during the play "Educating Rita" by Willy Russell.

The first 200 words of this essay...

Outline the changes Rita goes through during the play "Educating Rita" by Willy Russell. Is Frank's quote, "Found a better song to sing have you? No - you've found a different song, that's all - and on your lips it's shrill and hollow and tuneless," a fair comment?

Rita undergoes many changes throughout the play. As the title suggests, Rita gains an academic education during the story, but she also learns a great deal about the lessons of life.

In the beginning of the play, Rita seems to be "only" a hairdresser, for she is blunt, and she speaks in a colloquial way with a lot of slang. For example, in scene one, she associates a religious painting as "pornography of its day", she uses slang such as "bleedin", she drops the end consonants of her words and she swears profusely. In the second scene, she teaches Frank the phrase "off one's cake". She refers to many television programs, even commercials, when she calls Frank "A Flora Man". In scene three, she is "under the impression that all books are literature", a view she changes later on. Rita calls Frank a "geriatric hippie" just because of his