If one thing has altered in the 37 years since Willy Russell wrote Educating Rita, it’s that students now hold their tutors accountable. These days it costs on average over £5,000 per year for the kind of Open University course that Russell’s intellectually insatiable hairdresser Rita embarks upon; and time and again you wonder what sort of value for money she’s getting, since her supervisor, Frank, is so patently a tenured waste of space. It’s no surprise that the governing body eventually packs him off on gardening leave in Australia; rather, you wonder what took them so long?
To his credit, David Birrell does manage to flip Frank’s alcoholic self-pity into a form of inverted heroism. Accused of falling off the rostrum mid-lecture, he retorts: “Yes, but I went down talking and I was still talking when I got up again.” And it is fascinating to see the spark of engagement that periodically lights up his eyes when he springs to his bookshelves and withdraws the volume concealing a bottle of Famous Grouse.
It’s not often that this modest two-hander offers much to look at, yet Elizabeth Newman’s joint production with Derby theatre has an imposing visual impact – the scuffed parquet, mullioned windows and cracked leather of Ciaran Bagnall’s set enables you to view academia the way Rita sees it, as a kind of seductively erudite alternative universe. And it quickly becomes a cosmos with Jessica Baglow’s radiant Rita at its centre. She has, to use a non-academic term, quite a gob on her; her Pygmalion-esque initiation to the world of critical theory and wholefood bistros is a wonder to behold.
•At Octagon theatre, Bolton, until 11 February. Box office: 01204 520661. Then at Derby theatre, 17 February-11 March. Box office: 01332 593939.
