At the beginning of the play, Rita enters the room on the first floor of a Victorian-built university in the north of England. Franks first impression of her is that she is funny and very sarcastic. Rita persuades Frank to teach her after a lot of pestering. Frank feels as if though he is not good enough to teach someone so enthusiastic because he has failed to do so with his previous students, who complain a lot about his drunken behaviour.
Rita is very keen to learn. Franks asks her ‘What do you want to learn?’ Rita replies ‘Everything’.
The relationship between Frank and Rita is indistinct at first, as they seem like two totally different people. It is hard to imagine that they could on with each other because Frank is in his late forties and Rita is young, in her twenties. Frank is also very dreary, pessimistic and smart whereas Rita is full of life and not very intelligent. Surprisingly, later on in the play when Rita begins to visit Frank more often, they begin to have long personal talks (e.g.) when Rita has problems with her husband not accepting her decisions, Rita tells Frank openly about her situation as if they are close friends. Rita trusts frank and as well as receiving help from Frank she also helps Frank (e.g.) When Frank has problems at home, Rita is prepared to give advice because she feels as if though she owes him something. Rita encourages him not to drink alcohol heavily, only because she cares about him.
Rita feels very incomplete from the start of the play. When her husband wants Rita to have a baby, she refuses, as she believes that having a baby will invade her life and she feels the need to discover her self before she has a baby. Her attitude drives her husband away.
Rita now begins to make progress. After coming back from summer school, she is overjoyed at her experience. She feels the need to give her self a personality and her look makeover because in her eyes, the students have a different way of dressing and style. She believes that she has become a brand new person because of her confidence gain and all the knowledge she has gained. She wears more stylish clothes because she feels more accepted, she does not speak slang and her accent is not the same, she has a better job as a waitress (in the B Stroke), she can mix in with the students, has friends who are high-class and reads more books while going to theatres. Because Rita invited herself into a new way of life, she also had to leave her old life behind. Rita discovers this when she is with her family and ‘old’ friends at the pub. The atmosphere is loud and awkward for her and she begins to feel separate from them.
Rita only realises that changing your appearance or pretending to be someone your not is meaningless after she moves in with a posh women called Trish. Rita get the impression from Trish that she is truly secure, happy and has loads of friends because of the way she talks and dresses and her accommodation is quite luxurious. Trish does have a lot of friends but she has made her self-unhappy because she is not genuine and does not have such friends either.
Eventually Trish attempts to commit suicide because she is very depressed due to her invented life. At this, Rita stops and thinks about what happened. She finds it hard to believe at first because Trish seemed so happy. Rita begins to be afraid that the same might happen to her because some of her friends were only there for the sake of it and she was having bad intentions about her family, she was putting them to the side. Rita goes back to Frank for guidance. After discussing what happened to Trish, Rita decides to be herself and change her name back to Rita. Rita says ‘I’m trying to drop all that pretentious crap’. She has learnt that you have to change more than your appearance to be improved. She learns this partially from the hairdresser’s salon where people want to change totally, just with a single new hairstyle.
To begin with, Rita was a down-to-earth person, she became a bit false during her tutoring period but in the end she came back to her one hundred percent regular self. Initially Rita’s aim in life was to discover her self and be confident enough of to explain and respond to novels, she wanted to be the individualist in her family as no one else in her family was that intelligent. I think that Rita was genuinely smart after her tutoring period with Frank. Rita, in addition learned to control her self and her life. She has realised at the end of her learning time that her education was not supposed to change who she was, but aid her in the future. Rita had gained respect for herself because she knew that she had more options in life. She didn’t have to be a hairdresser or an uneducated mother without a job. Rita has also a variety of friends, whereas before she only made friends through her hairdresser salon. The friends she did have were just gossiping people with nothing major to say, but her new friends create a good setting for her. It is a place where she can share her knowledge. Rita has changed what’s inside her, which is the key to happiness, as she can hold her usual image and still be respected for what she knows whereas doing the opposite is just false.