Educating Rita.

This play is possibly my favourite play. It's written by Willy Russell who also wrote Blood Brothers and a play called One for The Road that my mum auditioned for! It's just such a beautiful play and is all about literature and the English language so naturally, je l'aime. See the interesting contrast there? I talked about loving the English language...in French. Haha!
    Anyway, Rita is this beautiful twenty six year old Scouser hair dresser who is just SO WITTY and so intelligent. She goes to the Open University to learn because she wants to find herself and she meets Frank, her alcoholic tutor who she describes as a geriatric hippie. The first time Frank sets her an essay, the question is something like "How could one overcome the staging difficulties in Ibsen's Peer Gynt?". Rita answers with "Do it on the radio." I'm sorry but that is just hilarious! It's so, so clever because it's just ridiculously true. It's a completely valid answer; how could you fault it? Oh and believe you me, I have wanted to "do a Rita" in many of my essays!
    Okay, so what I love most about the play is that there's this underlying romance/sexual tension throughout the scenes. I mean Frank CLEARLY fancies Rita a bit; he thinks she's gorgeous and Frank manages to change Rita and so she just obviously fancies him a bit too. It's just so good! I got reminded of this play when I wrote the word assonance in my last post. There's this part when Frank tries to explain assonance to Rita but she's just like "assonance is getting the rhyme wrong". Which to be honest, it is! It's just that no one would ever say that. They'd come up with some long winded explanation to describe it as a meaningful literary technique which yes, it is but it's also just...a wrong rhyme.
     Rita is the character I would love to play more than any character in the whole wide world (except possibly Elizabeth Bennet or Hermione Granger). I'm not sure I could do her justice because she's just SO AMAZING but I would try. I'm not sure I could EVER be as good as the fantastic Julie Walters though. She plays Rita in the film and she's an inspiration. She's just got the perfect cheeky Rita grin that gets you everytime and the on-screen chemistry between her and Michael Caine as Frank is just stunning. Oh, my heart's beating just thinking about it! I need to read the play again but I haven't got a copy and mum threw my video away when the video machine started to eat all the tapes it was getting so ancient. I must buy a copy of the play and a copy of the DVD asap! Anyway, that's Educating Rita for ya. There's an example of an actual rhyme, not assonance. Oh and here's a picture of that pure chemistry between Frank and Rita in the film that I was talking about. That some people think doesn't even exist. But it soooo does.

Sally x