Educating Rita
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Educating Rita is a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell which premièred at The Warehouse, London, in 1980. It was subsequently made into a 1983 film. It is a play for two actors set entirely in Frank's office at the university.
[edit] Plot
Educating Rita is about Susan White (Walters in the movie), a married woman in her twenties working as a hairdresser who signs up for a course at the Open University because she is eager to learn. Susan has changed her name to Rita because Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown is her favourite book. Her husband urges her to have a baby and strongly opposes her decision to go to university. When the play opens Rita meets her tutor for the first time. Dr. Frank Bryant (Caine) is an unsuccessful middle-aged academic with a drinking problem who has no experience in teaching students but who has agreed to tutor OU students because he needs the money to fuel his out of control drinking habits.
The plot is a reworking of the old Pygmalion motif: As time goes by, Frank gradually overcomes his initial repulsion to teach English literature to an utterly uneducated person. Eventually, his rising ambition to turn Rita into a respectable and educated member of society gets the better of him, and when he sees how quickly Rita learns he falls in love with his own creation. Failing to see that Rita is no longer dependent on him, he asks her to spend the rest of her life with him, but Rita -- or rather Susan, as she calls herself now again -- politely declines.
[edit] Film
The film stars Michael Caine and Julie Walters.
