English playwright Willy Russell (1947 - )’s plays often concern alienated female protagonists who desire to escape their restrictive social and cultural backgrounds in the post-industrial England of the 1970s and 1980s. His eleventh and arguably most important play, Educating Rita (1980), is no exception to this thematic preoccupation. The winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy, Educating Rita tells the story of a working-class hairdresser, Rita, who aspires to study English literature in an Open University setting in order to become educated—and through this process, she hopes, improve her self-esteem and expand her career and lifestyle options. During the course of the play, which unfolds entirely in the university office of Rita’s alcoholic tutor, the disillusioned but likeable Frank Bryant, Russell raises important questions for his audience regarding the nature and purpose of education. As this presentation will argue, these include the play’s overarching conundrum: By what criteria can we state that a person is educated? Russell’s play also emphasizes the value of experiential education (e.g. self-discovery on the part of the learner rather than being merely told what to think), as opposed to the sometimes stifling limitations of academia, while subtly highlighting the tensions between teacher-centered learning and student-centered learning. At the same time, Russell suggests through Rita’s dramatic transformation of identity from a wisecracking neophyte in love with the idea of learning to a much more sophisticated appreciator of literature that, perhaps inevitably, the qualities of originality and enthusiasm that truly motivated students initially bring to their learning can become muted during the process of becoming formally “educated.”
