What have Frank and Rita gained and lost at the end of the play?

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Dimple Shah

What have Frank and Rita gained and lost at the end of the play?

        Both Frank and Rita change drastically throughout the course of the play. Both become increasingly confident and gain opportunities towards the end of the play.

        The audience is introduced to Frank as a drunk, eccentric and jaded English professor. In the first dialogue Frank is muttering to himself, “Where the hell? Eliot? No. E, e, e, e…Dickens,” whilst in search of his concealed bottle of whisky. As the opening scene continues the audience discovers Frank’s negativity towards himself, he is disillusioned about his job and his abilities. His drinking is clearly a significant problem and the reasons for this escapism are deeply ingrained; he despises himself and even describes himself as an, “appalling teacher.” From this the audience is shown an internally depressed man who is dissatisfied with his role in life. The audience then receives quite a confusing picture of Rita; on the one hand she is self conscious and lacks self esteem, “I was dead surprised when they took me. I don’t suppose the would have done if it’d been a proper university,” they, being the figures within a university in positions of authority, but on the other she is desperately trying to better herself and release her self from her view of working class culture where people are either, “pissed or on the Valium.” Her original failure at school has meant that Rita has an idealized vision of universities and their students, one which she does not fit. Her dialect, “he gets pissed an’ stands in the street shoutin’ an’ challengin’ death to come out an’ fight. It’s dead good,” is accented and she believes that it is not suitable for the image of an educated woman. The audience are also shown that Rita does not possess the vocabulary to express literary concepts on anything other than on a basic level as indicated when Rita describes Frank’s room, “It’s a perfect mess. It’s like wherever you’ve put something down it’s grown to fit there.” Frank subtly starts to teach her by correcting her, “You mean that over the year’s it’s acquired a certain patina.” Rita is shown as a woman in search of her identity.

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        However both of these initial characters change, whether they do so for better or for worse could be debated. Rita’s character changes immensely, she gains and loses so many aspects of her life. Her marriage demises, she loses her, “individuality,” or, “uniqueness,” as Frank calls it, she becomes similar to all the other students before her, nevertheless she gains many new opportunities and choices such as friends and jobs. She becomes increasingly confident throughout and her growing literary knowledge and understanding aids her when introducing herself to the, “proper students,” as she refers to them. Her range of knowledge develops ...

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