Educating Rita, about a working-class Liverpool girl's hunger for education, is 'simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy ending.' Sunday Times
Educating Rita premiered at the RSC Warehouse, London, in June 1980. Voted Best Comedy of 1980, it was subsequently made into a highly successful film with Michael Caine and Julie Walters. 'Russell plays don't date, any more than Jane Austin novels- Rita is a universal figure: any of us in a time of transition, increasingly uncomfortable in our old world but, as yet, unproven in the new.' Libby Purves, The Times, 28.07.10 'Willy Russell is a dramatistof exceptional warmth and humanity.' Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, 28.07.10 'Russell, too easily dismissed as a slavish populist, her seems a cherishably perceptive observer of the vagaries of social class and sexual politics.' Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, 28.07.10
Educating Rita