Educating Rita @ Liverpool Playhouse

To take an iconic, Liverpool-based play – 35 years on from its original staging – and produce it in its home city, while making it as fresh, invigorating and important as it ever has been, is no mean feat; but this is exactly what Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse artistic director Gemma Bodinetz and the cast of Educating Rita have managed.

Let’s get this straight: Willy Russell is a genius when it comes to taking 'ordinary' people such as Rita (here played by a sublime Leanne Best) and her tutor, Frank (played by an equally impressive Con O’Neill), and invoking both the recognisable and the unexpected.

On the face of it, Educating Rita could easily have been My Fair Lady with mortarboards, but what Russell managed to create is so much more important than this, awarding the play a depth and resonance with which everybody can identify.

A few tweaks have been made here and there to make the production feel more relevant to a 21st-century audience, but there's nothing that slows the original narrative or wavers in the face of political correctness. At the play's heart beats a vigorous swipe at the inaccessibility of education and, indeed, the way the desire for self improvement can come at a cost beyond the personal.

In a quite beautiful, semi-circular book-lined office (designed by Conor Murphy), Best takes the role made famous by Julie Walters in the 1983 movie and adds a different level of integrity to Rita, who is at once warm and cuddly, cold and reserved. This is not a criticism, but rather an understanding of the fact that, although Rita is designed to be a 'Liverpool everywoman,' she also has a determined, self-defining outlook that stares into the abyss and laughs at its terrors.

That Best has achieved such a firm grasp on Rita’s motives is testament to her ability as an outstanding actress, but the manner in which Rita’s near-maternal tenderness towards her studies is allowed to develop – along with her resentment of being told to follow guidelines set down by people she has never even met (her examiners) – takes this performance way beyond the norm.

Con O’Neill delivers a portrait of frustration that is as powerful as it is understated, and is the perfect balance to Best’s dynamism and hope. With quick-witted guile and panache, O’Neill manages to illustrate just how mixed up and – in the end – scared Frank is, and so turns in what many will see as a definitive performance of the curmudgeonly lecturer whose dreams have long since turned to dust.

Ultimately, Educating Rita is a song of its times, and Bodinetz has been careful to inject a sense of ‘the now.’ It is a play that can handle it – and thus a play that will be performed again and again, another 35 years down the line.