Rita, for her part, challenges his prejudices and as she warms up, the play’s underlying questions of how education, and literature, can liberate us psychically begin to seem more relevant to the place and value of the arts now, in post-lockdown society. Before it does, the tone wobbles and it feels a little too lost in the past, from nostalgic references to Kim Wilde and Robin Day to the unreformed 1980s wardrobe (hot-pink jumpers, pencil skirts, gold belts), and Rita’s bright-eyed hope of transformation, which, in this period context, seems to capture the dream of upward class mobility in Thatcher’s Britain, alongside her purer desire to feed her soul with learning.Īs the comedy calms and the drama sets in, the actors build a chemistry that contains more intellectual tensions to become a better, deeper, play with an almost painful tenderness between them by the end.ĭirected by Max Roberts, the story ekes out Frank’s contempt for academic snobbery but also his own inverted snobberies towards Rita, who he seems first to hail as something of a latter-day noble savage (or “native” in her words). It is more that the comedy doesn’t always land in the early scenes, sometimes feeling over-egged, while the drama takes its time to gather in force.
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