Cornwall’s open air Minack Theatre revives Educating Rita and it is a joy

Educating Rita

Minack Theatre,

Cornwall

Until August 30, 1hr 50mins

Rating:

The Minack open-air theatre, near Land’s End, is doing an actual play – a rare event indeed in this endless theatre drought. The planned tour was kyboshed by Covid but it has been salvaged for a run at this spectacular cliffside venue. I saw it in a high wind better suited to The Tempest: the actors’ hair was all over the shop, and the cast had to slide paperweights around to hold down Rita’s English Literature essays. 

Willy Russell’s play, celebrating its 40th anniversary, still works its magic, however.  Rita is the unhappily married Mersey hairdresser – or, rather, hurdresser – who, by doing an Open University course, seeks more from her life. Her literary criticism is initially from the hip. ‘Wasn’t his wife a cow?’ she says of Macbeth. Howards End is ‘really crap’. And as for Yeats, she thinks he’s a wine lodge. 

Jessica Johnson is an energetic, funny Scouse sass-pot – Julie Walters was, of course, the original Rita – who goes from being a blunt chisel to a honed critic. She partners well with that excellent light comic actor Stephen Tompkinson – warm, emphatic and pompous as her sozzled tutor Frank (the Michael Caine part in the film version), a failed poet who glugs whisky stashed behind Dickens and E.M. Forster in his book-lined den. It’s his job to discipline the mind of the irreverent student who wants to escape her life of curling tongs and married oppression. She of course ends up educating Frank. 

It’s curious how you remember Rita’s more serious observations of literature over Frank’s professional judgments. Indeed, one of the themes here is that Rita is transformed, by her own thirst for literature, into a more optimistic version of Frank. The difference being that Rita has the moral courage that has deserted her tutor, whose  marriage is on the rocks and who wallows in Scotch topped up with self-pity. It is sharp-eyed Rita who comes at him with the burning question as to why he stopped writing poetry. That same question might well be asked about Willy Russell’s playwriting career; his absence from the stage in recent decades is one of the theatre’s great mysteries. He was a superb folk dramatist who seems to have run out of plays. 

If Educating Rita occasionally stretches belief – I never quite bought that this particular Frank had read all those books you can see lining his study – Russell crams in more soul and emotional clout than you get in much posher dramas about the emancipating power of literature. Forty years on, it still sounds witty and wise and you can feel the author’s love for Rita beaming through, just as it does in his later creation, Shirley Valentine. 

It’s a joy to revisit in this revival (by Max Roberts) set against knock-out views of a restless sea of the sort romantic poets bang on about.