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EspañolEDUCATING RITA
'''Educating Rita''' is an award-winning stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell. It is a play for two actors set entirely in the office of a university lecturer.
Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, ''Educating Rita'' premièred at The Warehouse, London, in June 1980 starring Julie Walters and Mark Kingston. The play was directed by Mike Ockrent.
In 1983, Russell adapted the play for the screen.
''Educating Rita'' is about Susan, a married woman in her twenties working as a hairdresser who signs up for a course at the Open University because she is eager to learn. Susan has changed her name to Rita because ''Rubyfruit Jungle'' by Rita Mae Brown is her favourite book. Her husband urges her to have a baby and strongly opposes her decision to go to university. When the play opens Rita meets her tutor for the first time. Dr Frank Bryant is an unsuccessful middle-aged academic with a drinking problem who has no experience in teaching working-class students but who has agreed to tutor OU students because he needs the money.
The plot is a reworking of the old Pygmalion motif: As time goes by, Frank gradually overcomes his initial repulsion to teach English literature to an utterly uneducated person. Eventually, his rising ambition to turn Rita into a respectable and educated member of society gets the better of him, and when he sees how quickly Rita learns he falls in love with his own creation. Failing to see that Rita is no longer dependent on him, he asks her to spend the rest of his life with him, but Rita—or rather Susan, as she calls herself now again—politely refuses.
★ the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea
★ G. B. Shaw's ''Pygmalion'' (1913)
★ ''My Fair Lady''
Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, ''Educating Rita'' premièred at The Warehouse, London, in June 1980 starring Julie Walters and Mark Kingston. The play was directed by Mike Ockrent.
In 1983, Russell adapted the play for the screen.
| Contents |
| Plot summary |
| See also |
Plot summary
''Educating Rita'' is about Susan, a married woman in her twenties working as a hairdresser who signs up for a course at the Open University because she is eager to learn. Susan has changed her name to Rita because ''Rubyfruit Jungle'' by Rita Mae Brown is her favourite book. Her husband urges her to have a baby and strongly opposes her decision to go to university. When the play opens Rita meets her tutor for the first time. Dr Frank Bryant is an unsuccessful middle-aged academic with a drinking problem who has no experience in teaching working-class students but who has agreed to tutor OU students because he needs the money.
The plot is a reworking of the old Pygmalion motif: As time goes by, Frank gradually overcomes his initial repulsion to teach English literature to an utterly uneducated person. Eventually, his rising ambition to turn Rita into a respectable and educated member of society gets the better of him, and when he sees how quickly Rita learns he falls in love with his own creation. Failing to see that Rita is no longer dependent on him, he asks her to spend the rest of his life with him, but Rita—or rather Susan, as she calls herself now again—politely refuses.
See also
★ the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea
★ G. B. Shaw's ''Pygmalion'' (1913)
★ ''My Fair Lady''
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