Review: Educating Rita by Willy Russell, The Watermill, Bagnor near Newbury (From Wiltshire Times)

Two hander keeps its wit and charm on stage

10:54am Wednesday 14th October 2009 in Theatre & Arts By Pat Harper

This is such a well known film that its origins as a play, first performed in 1980, are sometimes overlooked.

Seeing it as a two-hander in its single-room setting reminds you just what a good story it is; without the distraction of other people or the outside world, the charm and wit of the developing relationship plays out to great effect on the intimate Watermill stage.

Timothy Bentinck plays Frank, a shambling bear of a man whose best years are behind him.

World-weary and dependent on drink to get him through the day, he stashes whisky bottles behind his books and no longer writes poetry.

And then Rita bursts into his room and into his life, a young hairdresser who has signed up as an OU student because she just wants to know everything. Frank has been assigned as her tutor, and two more dissonant people you couldn’t imagine.

Claire Lams plays Rita, portraying brilliantly the hunger of an ill-educated but smart girl who knows she can do more if only given one chance.

To Frank she represents everything that he no longer is, and she shakes him out of his cynical torpor in a way no one, not even his wife or his girlfriend, has ever done.

He’s amused, intrigued, then delighted by her; the delight is mutual - but not quite in the way he dares to hope. Eventually she outgrows him, as he admits that he can no longer give her what she wants.

This is a very enjoyable, albeit bitter-sweet evening.

We all have memories of who we once might have been.