Brighton Year-Round 2023

Educating Rita

Lewes Little Theatre

Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Drama, Theatre

Venue: Lewes Little Theatre, Lancaster Street

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Something singular’s happening here. At every scene the audience claps. That’s not normal, and certainly not on a Monday night. Alan Carter directs and set-designs Willy Russell’s now classic two-hander 1980  Educating Rita as the opening play in Lewes Little Theatre‘s 2023-24 season.

Of course jaded middle-aged lecturer Frank (Lucas August) who’s only taken on Open University teaching to pay for his expensive drink habit, would deride that. “What is a classic?” he might ask. Though looking for his latest discreetly-hid whisky bottle as the work opens under “Charlie” Dickens has connotations Russell didn’t pursue.

Frank might ask about the title too. Because who’s Rita? The simple tale of the lecturer who thinks with only partial truth that he’s Mary Shelley and created a Frankenstein’s monster of hollow literary pretension from a unique unsophisticated hairdresser of 26 – whilst somehow humanising himself under her influence – wouldn’t have survived over 40 years without it being more profound. It’s about love too, but not the obvious kind.

To take Lit Crit further, Rita is being “educated” or in that true sense led out of Rita to herself, and indeed as we soon find Rita’s an assumed name; the original Susan is being rediscovered. As Rita says there is no “working class culture” to patronise and at a crucial point she finds her mother in tears after singing at the pub saying “we sang better songs”.

It’s one of the great moments of this night’s production. Because Rita (Lulu Freeman), or Susan knows she can’t stay as she is, and it’s about choices. Not the consumerist choices we’ve been told from the 1980s on: to always choose and choose always the same. Saying Rita as she is with her raw, biting wit is “rather wonderful” as Frank does, and smiling at her one-liner essays, is to limit Rita. And what she’s leaving and feels alien in – her old life, her terrible phase of neither belonging to the old or the new – is brought out in an extraordinary performance. Something’s lost. More is found.

This is why Freeman’s Rita is so startlingly fine. Freeman’s a revelation. Each time she enters and Frank attempts to dismiss then humour her, Freeman lets slip more of Rita herself, slips into more of the world her lecturer hesitates to invite her into: from what assonance is (a set-piece as Frank  reels off jargon), her pulp novel enthusiasm, to bringing Harold Robbins as analogy, through Peer Gynt as a radio play (sound critique).

Every Scouse inflection is pitched so we see the gradual overlay of vocabulary – which was never wholly unsophisticated: Rita’s smart from the get-go and clearly intellectually able. We receive class education ourselves. The school where you can’t be seen to be engaged, the expectation you start having babies as Rita’s ruses become more desperate. Freeman inflects memories with a shudder and laugh at the same time.

And Freeman’s Rita is outstanding, with August her dour, more even-tempered foil. Frank is more recitative to Rita’s aria. If she’s full of coloratura skirls of wit and emotional Catherine wheels, August comes alive too in the gradations of Frank’s inebriation, his sudden flare-ups, his slumps of whisky-maudlin; an ability to present hurt without overstating it. And moments of truth where he’s emotionally ahead of Rita.

There’s nothing routine in August’s sense of Frank’s growing horror at what he thinks he’s done to Rita; nor his own self-deception at seeing ahead but not far enough. When Michael Caine replaced Mark Kingston in the film, it said that Frank’s character has presence but no great range. August does more with what he’s given. There’s a shabby leanness to his Frank, a quietly haunted shell of a poet.

Initially and for a long time Rita confides and invites Frank to do the same. The crisis comes when she shies off attending a dinner party of Frank’s, and realises she can’t go back to her old life either.

Freeman’s hesitation as she arrives, her confession she was going to quit as she traces the arc of realisation; the way Freeman brings a lump to her throat as she reports Rita’s mother’s recognition of singing better songs is mesmerising and deeply moving. As you watch, Freeman lives every moment as though it’s just thought of. This is rare. There’s nothing to make you remember Julie Walter’s performance either. It’s new and quite mesmerising

Kirsten Bowen and the LLT Wardrobe Team also deserve huge credit for sourcing such wonderfully crisp self-colours of Rita’s to begin; then with nearly every entrance to the stuck door Rita finally oils, there a fresh outfit and growing sophistication – or Frank might say, pretentiousness. Rita abandons the hairdressers at a time she no longer confides so much in Frank for a bistro, after her husband presents an ultimatum.

Then Rita finds Trish, the summer school, young students, and besting them in a horribly vivid cameo of lording class confidence over D H Lawrence.

There’s layers to the original the film makes explicit. And Freeman especially in her transformation,  and August, somehow bring these colours back into the room. You can almost smell the grass from the student-spotted lawn as Freeman’s Rita triumphs in her own (even bullying) cleverness.

But she’s not wrong. And there’s a heartwarming way Freeman portrays Rita’s final awakening: recognising something after a mutual crisis of faith and crossroads in both their lives.

There’s a warmth of interaction between the actors too. And it’s beautifully contained in Alan Carter’s direction and indeed his set: classically symmetrical, two windows, two bookshelves, the somewhat stage-left desk. It’s a fine set and Jo Cull’s props are remarkable.

What makes it is the patient sourcing of the real books. That is a Macmillan Collected W B Yeats with the cream dust-wrapper, and the Blake looks like the old Penguin edition. The way Frank decides to teach Rita Blake’s “O Rose thou art sick” then finds she knows it by heart and had covered all his Songs of Innocence and Experience “obviously”, is one of those jolts August registers to Freeman’s sang-froid. Especially when Rita then turns in a very literary reading.

And there’s a cheeky hommage: a period-poster of Russell’s subsequent 1983 hit Blood Brothers outside the stuck door stage-right – if you’re only slightly right of that, you’ll see it.

Together with Christopher Pugh’s lighting and evocative sound we have a truly exemplary and undistracting creative team built around these two performances. Even if you’ve seen this play, know the film, get a fresh education in masterly acting and see this.

Published October 17, 2023October 17, 2023 by Simon Jenner