The Stage

Educating Rita

Published Tuesday 27 July 2010 at 09:48 by By Mark Shenton

Southwark’s Menier Chocolate Factory continues its seemingly unstoppable assault on the West End with this latest transfer of its double bill of classic Willy Russell plays from the 1980s. While Meera Syal reprises her wonderfully warm and witty solo performance as Shirley Valentine, Jeremy Sams’s production of Educating Rita gets a welcome burst of new theatrical energy with the recasting of the role of university lecturer Dr Frank Bryant, joining the feisty holdover of Laura Dos Santos in the title role of 26-year-old Liverpudlian hairdresser Rita (who is really Susan, but has changed her name as part of her search for a new education and identity).

Tim Pigott-Smith (Frank) and Laura Dos Santos (Rita) in Educating Rita at Trafalgar Studios Photo: Tristram Kenton

Tim Pigott-Smith, resembling an equally ineffectual Neil Kinnock, invests Frank with a more fully-inhabited sense of pathos and sardonic humour as a defence against the disappointments of academic life that is nearly as robust as that contained in the bottles of alcohol he keeps secreted all over the bookshelves of his study to turn it into a veritable bottle bank.

Though Sams’s production still finds the juddering bridges between the multiple scenes of Russell’s play clumsy to negotiate, the scenes themselves flow far more smoothly, and there’s now a real, heartfelt rapport between Frank and Dos Santos’s vibrant, feisty Rita. She may famously state that the answer to solving Peer Gynt’s staging difficulties is to do it on the radio, but Dos Santos - who first performed this play there on Radio 4 - helps to solve Educating Rita’s own staging difficulties with her own irrepressible spirit.

And if her tutor Frank advises her character to eschew subjectivity in literary criticism and support her opinions always with reference to known literary sources, I’m not going to be similarly constrained in my dramatic criticism of this double bill: Russell’s plays are now both modern classics about the transformative powers of travel and education respectively, and it’s a pleasure to have them back.