Educating Rita
This Isn’t Your 80s “Rita” … Or Is It?
Many people remember the movie, Educating Rita, starring Michael Caine and Julie Walters, that celebrated the rise of a young hairdresser to an educated (and coincidentally liberated) woman. The character, Rita’s, transformation depended very much upon the disheveled charm of her boozy, over-the-hill professor.
The play upon which the movie was based, Educating Rita tells the story of a young woman who thirsts for something more than work and evenings at the corner pub with her husband. She tells her tutor: “There’s no contentment (in her community) because there’s no meaning.” That meaning, she is certain, will come from the books she has never read and the philosophers she has never heard about. Her reticent teacher Frank, always on the verge of being sacked by the university for his drinking, is dubious about the power of the education that Rita hungers for, but begrudgingly postpones his own downward spiral to ready her for England’s over-all exams.
The Colony’s revival of “Rita” has to o’er leap Michael Caine’s shadow, among other things, to establish its own credentials. We can accept the difficulty of Rita’s emerging from British working-class ghetto from what we already know of England’s immovable class lines, and I think the play resonates with women who, during America’s own fight for liberation during the late 70s and early 80s, had somewhat similar experiences. What, then, possessed the playwright to update the play?
The playwright, Willy Russell, revised the play in 2003 in order to breathe new life into the original. However, it’s charm consists of the frozen-in-time moment when women such as Rita (not to mention men such as the playwright, who comes from the same roots) began to break out of their socially restricted prisons. Perhaps I can’t read current English societal problems from this distance, but entrapment in social strata seems farther away now than, say, oh, home-grown terrorism.
On opening night, the post-performance crowd pondered the seeming anachronism of only one line. Not the famous “You, Rita, you” –more on that later – but a reference to “24 satellite channels.” This 21st century reference in the midst of a very late-20th century situation jarred the audience into the recognition that, indeed, the play had been updated. But, with enigmatic costuming (however beautifully conceived by Terry A. Lewis), the ubiquitous English professor’s office/library (designed with studio-quality realism by Victoria Proffit), and general theme, that one line seemed more jarring than the play’s 1980s milieu would have done.
That is not to say that the Colony’s Educating Rita is not entertaining. Rebecca Mozo is appealing as Rita. Her accent bringing her sharply into juxtaposition with the world she wants to inhabit. Bjorn Johnson has the more difficult task of finding his own Frank. The famous line alluded to earlier, “You, Rita, You,” provides a challenge to find all the hurt, self-pity and resignation that marks the character for his ultimate doom.
Along with the theatre’s characteristic technical excellence, Director Cameron Watson has honed his cast to create an environment of mutual dependence and need that ripens and ultimately must split apart.
Educating Rita performs at the Colony Theatre, 555 North Third St., Burbank, on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm, and Sundays at 2:00 and 7:30 pm through September 21st. Additional performances Saturday, August 30th and September 6th at 3:00 pm and Thursday, September 11th and September 18th at 8 pm. Tickets, $37.00 to $42.00. Phone (818) 558-7000 or online at www.colonytheatre.org