Educating Rita

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EDUCATING RITA

        The play is in a naturalistic setting. The whole play takes place inside one room, namely Frank’s office; a book-lined study in a university in northern England. And by adhering to the unity of place Willy Russell is not just able to concentrate on the drama, but also the humour of the play. The play is set in year it was written, 1985. The play itself is structured into two Acts. The first act deals with Rita beginning her search and her education, trying desperately to fit into Frank’s world. Frank is the teacher, the one with all the knowledge. He’s always saying the right words. Rita looks up to Frank. Whereas on the other hand you have his opposite, Rita, who is uneducated, loud, out spoken and common. Rita breezes into Frank’s life like a breath of fresh air. The story of the play is that of the developing and changing relationship between the two of them both as teacher and student and also on a more personal level. During the play the character of Rita is completely transformed. And this needs to be shown through the way the actors play their characters and the way they interact on the stage.

        In the beginning she struggles greatly with her language skills, only managing to develop the necessary skills after her success at the summer school, to succeed in the second act.

        As the first act experiences the breakdown of Rita’s marriage with Denny; the second half of the play shows evidence of a strong rift between Frank and his partner Julia.

        The first point at which the audience comes face to face with the characters is Act 1 Scene 1. This scene is important because it introduces the characters to the readers and gives a good idea of the plot to follow. It helps you establish some information about the characters past, before they met. This in turn helps the audience to get to know the characters. The audience sees Rita in this scene as a very chatty person. She is open, quite common and tarty and not well spoken. She also still very much uneducated unlike those around her, like Frank and the other students. She doesn’t seem to fit in well with her surroundings, causing her to seem out of place.

        An actress playing Rita would need to be witty, confident and have good background knowledge of the play and Rita in particular. They would need to be able to keep up a strong Liverpudlian accent and act uneducated even if they were very smart themselves. They need to be able to adapt to the role and how it changes throughout the play. I would suggest that the actress playing Rita wears ‘tarty’ ‘cheap’ clothes. Bright colours would also help in this scene because she needs to give a strong lasting first image of Rita. She will need to use a lot of slang, simplistic, and colloquial language when playing Rita. The actress’ movements and gestures in this scene need to be exaggerated, strong, confidant, almost intimidating as the audience needs to see that Rita is not an educated or timid young lady, she is common, confident, tarty and definitely not afraid to speak her mind.

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        In terms of her relation to the character of Frank and the way that the actors interact on the stage, the actress playing Rita needs to act unintimidated, open, genuine, sociable, friendly and also looking up to Frank as he is the one that she wishes to learn everything from. I think that they both see qualities in each other, i.e. Frank does not want to ruin Rita’s uniqueness.

        A key moment in the scene, which reveals Rita’s character at this stage in the play is when she says, “Well that’s no good always meanin to is it? Y’ should ...

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