“Educating Rita”, Theatre by the Lake, Keswick
Jeremy Malies in Cumbria
4 April 2019
Cumbria-based Theatre by the Lake is touring a production of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita starring Jessica Johnson in the title role and Stephen Tompkinson as her tutor. This 1980 piece depicts a married hairdresser who has an interest in English literature visiting a dipsomaniac and lecherous university tutor as part of the Open University programme. During the tutorials she discovers fiction and drama as well as a new aspect of herself. The play was performed at Devonshire Park, Eastbourne, where this version delighted the town’s critically-astute dowagers. It is totally faithful to the original and has Russell’s approval.
Russell may well be toying with theatre critics when he has Frank, the lecturer, stress that criticism as far as possible should be approached as purely objective and should not be confused with opinion. Well, it’s my criticism that Stephen Tompkinson excels with all the rumpled qualities implicit in the playwright’s characterization, showing the wealth of manic nervous tics you would expect of an academic who is about to lose his job while being stimulated alternatively by the charms of his student and the return of his own creativity as a writer.
One of Tompkinson’s many achievements in the role is that his general handling of dialogue and reading of the verse that Rita is studying make him credible as an accomplished poet who is suffering from writer’s block. My only cavil is that he will always look a little too honest to be seducing a student and attempting to cheat on his live-in partner who is also, we learn, a former student.
Director Max Roberts is alive to the Pygmalion elements of the plot, working closely with Johnson on these. Had Bernard Shaw lived to see this wonderful play, I fancy he would have revelled in the social mobility that allows Rita to discuss classic texts with the mainstream undergraduates. Johnson succeeds with these major challenges but at times her Liverpool accent becomes unintelligible or wavers, seemingly travelling north-west to her native Sunderland and back. She could have benefited from a voice coach.
Patrick Connellan’s adaptable set and David Flynn’s sound design remind us that we are eavesdropping on the pair while the regular activity of the university goes on around us. This is significant because Rita will of course become subsumed by other students into the bohemian style of thinking that Frank has rebelled against, leaving his tenure in the balance. Alan Bennett once wrote an essay on how difficult it is to make the contents of a bookshelf look authentic on stage. Connellan ensures these are pukka with the running gag that Frank’s alcohol stashes lurk behind the larger volumes.
The play was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company forty years ago and this is an anniversary tour. Some of my favourite gags involving relatively obscure personalities from the late ‘70s have had to go, but Roberts has kept the flavour of the era while ensuring vitality and asking enough topical questions that we never feel it’s a period piece.
I’ve seen productions in which the situation is updated to the present day; plainly absurd since such classes would now be distance learning by Skype. You wish Rita well but fear for her (textual analysis skills are not life skills) as she steps out into the beginning of the ruthless Thatcher era.
By no means a prototypical “well-made play”, structurally the piece still strikes one as being as carefully crafted as anything by Rita’s beloved Chekhov. And the big gags will always work such as Rita’s celebrated idea for dealing with the staging problems inherent in a production of Peer Gynt? “Do it on the radio.” The production tours England, Wales and Scotland well into early summer.
