Educating Rita at the Volkstheater Vienna is a slightly too moralistic, yet entertaining short play with excellent actors.
In times when gender and class should not be a decisive factor for access to higher education Willy Russel’s play Educating Rita still can be topical, even after 30 years from its première. Set in Liverpool in the 1970s the story of Rita, a young blue-eyed hairdresser and real working class girl and Frank, the disillusioned college professor with a severe alcohol problem is both entertaining and thought provoking theatre. Actually the two act play as produced by the Volkstheater is really split in two halves. The first part of the play is entertaining and almost farcical, but the second part is a wee bit too moralistic. The performance by the two actors cast is really high quality throughout the play – both Katharina Straßer (Rita) and Erwin Ebenbauer (Frank) sparkle in their roles. Although the text is not explicitly adapted for the Viennese stage Rita has a nice broad accent and real street credibility while Frank is a little too much cliché with his tan cord jacket with patches on the elbows, and his scholarly remarks don’t always have that dry wit one would expect by a dried-in-the-wool philologian the likes of the late professor Schmidt-Dengler. Yet overall the jokes crack at the right moment, but are sometimes indeed marred by a little too much unnecessary moralistic topping and pathos, for example when Rita explains that she was unable to show up at the dinner party Frank invited her to, because she felt she wouldn’t fit in with all those “intelligent” people. While the first part of the play is mostly laughs (sometimes also rather cruel ones exploiting the naiveté of Rita) and one hilarious moment chasing the next, the second part of the play gets more intense as Frank becomes more and more attracted to Rita, and Rita – thanks to her progress with university – gets more and more emancipated but in the eyes of Frank looses her unconventional and unbiased way of looking at the world.
Although the production is on the main stage of the Volkstheater the set design and the props are minimal. A fake wall with a window and a library full of books (whose main purpose is to provide a hiding place for Frank’s empty whisky bottles), a desk and a revolving chair along with an armchair sketches out the office in which Frank works, teaches and above all drinks to suffer his students. There is no change of the décor or costumes except during the pause between Act I and Act II. The play is structured via small tableaus separated by short intervals with music and the lights off. The actors don’t leave the scene between tableaus, yet the change and growth of characters is noticeable via the dialogues and the action. The play really is more a series of sketches involving the two characters, rather than a continuous story. Each tableau culminates in a punch-line or an epiphany – yet the play doesn’t lack cohesion.
The Vokstheater production of Educating Rita is certainly worth watching alone for the outstanding performance of the actors, but it has its shortcomings. The emphasis is very much on the jokes and the airy aspects of the play, and the production doesn’t really flesh out the social criticism found in Russel’s text. When it does, criticism is always softened by a timely joke or pun. The audience seems to like this, so maybe this production of Educating Rita is more for socialites, than for socialists.
