At the Torch |
| Torch Theatre- Educating Rita , Torch Theatre, Milford Haven , February 6, 2004 |
If we question why a theatre company decides to stage a massive hit of the early 1980s – other than as a single-set two-hander it’s less costly to mount – we maybe need to take on board what’s changed in the intervening years. A lot has happened to education since feisty, innocent Rita breezed into the stuffy study of her reluctant Open University tutor over twenty years ago.Willie Russell, her creator, has be come enormously rich – partly by continuing to write about working-class life in the North-West in hits like Shirley Valentine and Blood Brothers, partly by becoming a complicit debaser of his own work in their translation to film. Rita and Frank have become iconic figures, but associated forever in the public mind with Julie Walters and Michael Caine in an entertaining movie version that by taking the action beyond the walls of Frank’s elitist world of academe lost much of the point of the play – that education then was about dead white writers taught by out-of-touch lecturers trapped in their ivory towers. There are other changes – these days that sticking door that keeps out the real world and locks in Frank’s failures could never be used as the neat metaphor it is because a lecturer and his student have to keep study doors open to avoid the Oleanna syndrome – and I heard one member of the audience wondering whether Frank, who sort of fancies his attractive protégée, had been “grooming” Rita, a possibility uncontemplated in those pre-paedophilia conscious days.. But crucially since then we have had the rejection of Thatcherism – Russell’s constant target – and its replacement by Blairism, whose project has been to continue the destruction of public services including education by more insidious means. If Russell were to write Educating Rita today it would be very different – no longer are the Ritas of this world denied access to higher education but the education our heroine here demands is no longer on offer. What’s fascinating about seeing Educating Rita today is its assumption that education had a value in itself, rather than being marketed as an entrée to mythical well-paid employment, and the problem for the underprivileged Ritas was in discovering and hanging on to your own cultural values. So I guess audiences at The Torch find themselves enjoying almost a period piece, a bittersweet comedy where the basic debates have been pushed off the public agenda. Poor Willie Russell is no longer an active participant in the process of political change in the way that he would like playwrights to be – why, even the ideological arguments in Blood Brothers have disappeared under the weight of its producers’ pretensions to create a perennial musical spectacular. At least Peter Doran’s excellent presentation of Educating Rita allows us to see the play clearly. He knows that Russell’s success lies not so much in being highly political but in his instinctive craftsmanship as a playwright – he can manipulate an audience by pressing all the right buttons, perhaps in a way that in our laid-back apolitical twenty-first century way we find a little discomfiting. But the play still has the power to bring a lump to the throat, a tear to the eye and plenty of laughs. The two characters fortunately look nothing like Walters and Caine, with Keith Woodason’s charismatic but burnt-out academic utterly credible and suggesting an even more pathetic and ambiguous character than we’re used to. One does long to see a bit of risk-taking at The Torch, but while they are committed to providing well-made classic plays then productions with performance standards as high as this can only make theatregoers of West Wales enormously lucky. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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