Educating Rita

Description

Educating Rita, about a working-class Liverpool girl's hunger for education, is 'simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy ending.' Sunday Times Educating Rita premiered at the RSC Warehouse, London, in June 1980. Voted Best Comedy of 1980, it was subsequently made into a highly successful film with Michael Caine and Julie Walters.

Willy Russell, born in Whiston near Liverpool, is one of the mostpopular and successful contemporary playwrights whose works are studiedin schools and colleges. His plays include: One for the Road, Stags and Hens, Educating Rita, Blood Brothers and Shirley Valentine.

Russell plays don't date, any more than Jane Austen novels - Rita is a universal figure: any of us in a time of transition, increasingly uncomfortable in our old world but, as yet, unproven in the new. * Libby Purves, The Times, 28.07.10 * Willy Russell is a dramatist of exceptional warmth and humanity. * Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, 28.07.10 * Russell, too easily dismissed as a slavish populist, here seems a cherishably perceptive observer of the vagaries of social class and sexual politics. * Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, 28.07.10 *