Book Club Review: Educating Rita
After a hiatus of nearly a year and a half, RAD Book Club is back with our first read: the 1980 play Educating Rita by Willy Russell.
Inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the play is a comic two-hander set entirely in the office of Frank, a jaded English Literature academic who has taken on extra work as an Open University tutor to pay for his drinking habit. His first student is Rita, a working class hairdresser from Liverpool who, dissatisfied with the routine of her stilted social and cultural life, seeks inner growth through education. A witty examination of class, literature, academia, and what constitutes a ‘good’ education, the play was later adapted into a BAFTA and Golden Globe winning film starring Michael Caine and Julie Walters, which you can currently watch for free on ITV’s streaming service.
As a group, we all appreciated the play’s humour and dialogue. The jokes were very well crafted and a lot of the play’s comedy, while a little dated, still made us laugh. The relationship between Frank and Rita was also a strong point. Their dynamic was really engaging and we found the ending to be very moving. Rita’s dialogue in particular sparkled on the page and we really enjoyed her playful yet earnest approach to life and education.
However, we also felt that the play was a little didactic and preachy at times, although we were unclear as to what message or moral it was trying to convey, and this occasionally made the play feel at odds with itself. We felt that this didacticism sometimes got in the way of the play’s strengths, particularly when it reduced the characters to talking heads instead of real people, and that this clashed with the play’s sense of humour. We also thought that the play’s class politics and its stance on education were occasionally a little reductive and muddled. The play spent a lot of time undermining both Rita’s initially naïve and uneducated appreciation of literature and the kind of uninventive, institutional education she goes on to receive through Frank but it never seems to offer any idea of what an actually ‘good’ education would constitute, which was frustrating given the play’s sometimes instructive and haughty tone.
Overall, though, we really enjoyed Russell’s play. It was entertaining and very funny and an interesting look at British class politics and social dynamics in the 1980s. As a group, we gave it a score of 7 out of 10.
Book Club will meet again on Thursday the 29th of June 2019 at 13:15-14:00 in the Library to discuss the book The Magician by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín. A fictional retelling of Thomas Mann’s life and that of his family, The Magician is also an intricate look at European history in the first half of the twentieth-century and offers a page-turning exploration of war, politics, art, and the demands of being a public figure in a time of huge turmoil.