Corpus Playroom
November 11-15
Dir. Pippa Dinnage; Joint Fletcher Players & HATS

Three Stars

There is no escaping the fact that Willy Russell’s Educating Rita is a very dated play. It sits uneasily in a modern theatre, being sentimental and cynical at turns, full of patronising, simpering class stereotypes and affected one-liners. At some moments, however, Philippa Dinnage’s production is genuinely funny – mainly through the sharp comic timing of Heather Simons, who carries off a near-perfect Liverpudlian accent to portray Rita, a downtrodden hairdresser who decides to miraculously open up her life through the Open University English Literature course. Simons has the unfortunate task of carrying the play, and manages to be both loquacious and fragile by turns. But ultimately she and her co-star Edward Rowett are lumbered under a poor script, a semi-Cinderella tale that doesn’t manage to interest or excite or stimulate theatre.

Rowett plays her alcoholic, pseudo-poet teacher Frank, and bravely attempts to give life to what can often be a dull character. Rowett’s acting is, at moments, brilliant, but there is a constantly drab undertone, going from scene to scene in a whiskey-induced haze of melancholia and inertia, slumped over his desk in a perpetual state of intellectual agony, resembling one of the awful Chekov characters he teaches Rita, and a slumbering audience, about.

The play seems to revolve around two very Cambridge themes: alcohol and academia. Walking to the Corpus Playroom at 9.30 in the evening, past figures reeling and stumbling back from various formal swaps, I wondered whether ‘Educating Rita’ would be a play that could be relevant, or pertinent, to Cambridge students. It is: few productions can successfully transform the Playroom into a supervisor’s study through the ingeniously simple use of stacks of musty books, papers and cranky-looking chairs.

The play did genuinely make me laugh at some points, and it is also admirable to see a performance of a work which confounds the usual Cambridge theatrical canon. Whether you want to be thrown back in this unfortunate time warp, or sit through an hour and a half of sort-of literary criticism mixed with a sort-of sob story about two lonely individuals battling against a cruel world armed with only a copy of Blake’s poems to comfort them, is another question.

Emma Hogan