Willy Russell’s comedy Educating Rita is almost 40 years old and heading back to Yorkshire

I call it big-little because there are just two cast members, the themes Russell tackles in Educating Rita are huge – and the latest production is taking in some epic stages as it travels the country.

The playwright himself is delighted to see his work continuing to resonate. “When will I ever be free of it? It’s coming up to its 40th anniversary would you believe?”

Russell says he thinks of the play with great affection – not least because of the success of that original 1980 production at the Warehouse Theatre (now Donmar Warehouse) where Julie Walters first played the role of Rita opposite Mark Kingston as Frank.

“The original production came together so well and I worked with people I really adored, Mike, Julie, Mark. Nobody had any big plans for this play, so when something happens so unexpectedly you always have a special regard for it because it came out of nowhere and suddenly made it.”

The success of the play was followed by the hit 1983 movie starring Michael Caine and Walters reprising her role as Rita. It won huge acclaim, winning BAFTAs and Golden Globes, and Oscar nominations.

Russell says: “That’s when everything kind of happened, everything went ballistic during that period. I was very fortunate to always have good strong women around me during that early success. I’m not one to lose touch with reality, but if I ever showed any signs of getting slightly wonderful I’d be cut down and put in my place, rightly so.”

The new UK production, in association with David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers and directed by Max Roberts premiered at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick last month before heading on a UK tour coming to Bradford’s Alhambra Theatre next week and Wakefield and Sheffield later in the tour.

Pugh and Rogers have become familiar names to Yorkshire audiences thanks to their work on the various iterations of the stage versions of the Calendar Girls story. They were producers of the play and subsequent musicals.

Russell says: “I first worked with David when he was an assistant on the very first tour of Blood Brothers in 1985 and we’ve tried to work together ever since and never quite managed to do it for one reason or another, so working with a producer I know and admire is great.”

Russell is involved in this new production “as I would be in any significant new production”, 
which stars Stephen Tompkinson as the university tutor Frank, 
the role played by Michael Caine in the film. It will also be set in the time period in which it was written.

The writer says: “There have been productions that have tried to set it in a contemporary setting, but the difference between education today and 1979 is so vast it doesn’t do the play any favours to make it a contemporary tale.

“People don’t see education as a route to salvation in the way they did in the year this was written. The idea then of working class people returning to education was in the air, it was a new and vibrant thing, and the collision of those worlds, of the non-educated and the rather elite red brick university, was a massive collision, but all of that has gone now.”

Jessica Johnson takes on the title role and it was a chance meeting between her and Tompkinson and a mutual love of the play which provided the spark for the new production

Johnson says: “I had just done a short run of Educating Rita in Durham at the Gala Theatre, and was telling Stephen how I’d love to get a longer run at this incredible role and how I thought he would make a great Frank.”

Tompkinson adds: “It transpired it’s a play we’ve both loved for many, many years. So I went away and re-read the play, which I had been reading since I was 15. In fact a school friend and I used to rehearse it in my dad’s garage together, but of course I was way too young for the role back then.

“But re-reading the play I realised I’m now the right age to play Frank which was a little bit scary to begin with. We can’t believe how fortunate we’ve been that Willy still has such interest in a play that he wrote 40 years ago, and in this production.

“To have Willy there at every stage of rehearsal, that’s truly inspirational and what will hopefully make this production stand apart. It’s his play, so we couldn’t look for more inspiration than that.”

The actor, who is known and loved across the nation for his time in long-running TV series including Ballykissangel, Drop the Dead Donkey, Wild at Heart and DCI Banks, is relishing getting inside the head of Frank.

Stephen said: “Frank is terribly disappointed in life, he’s not been a great success at being a poet, he’s disappointed in the way the curriculum dictates how he teaches.

“There’s nothing of him in there, there’s no passion. So to meet this woman with so much passion, he almost wants to run away. She offers him a little bit of a lifeline, and he’s doing the same for her. There is definitely an attraction for him.

“It’s a brilliantly written play, and a universal story of two lost souls, mismatched people in terms of character and background who meet at the right time to help each other in life.”

Teaching and learning

Willy Russell’s modern classic Educating Rita tells the story of married young hairdresser Rita who enrols on an Open University course to expand her horizons. But in her university tutor Frank she finds a frustrated but brilliant academic (and failed poet) who is a little too fond of a drink and initially less than enthusiastic to teach Rita. Slowly they begin to learn from each other.

Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, May 6 -11. Tickets 01274 432000 or bradford-theatres.co.uk. Theatre Royal, Wakefield, July 15-20. Sheffield Lyceum, July 22-27.

Full details www.educatingrita.co.uk