Learning the meaning of “Only connect” in E M Forster’s novel Howards End: Jamie McKeller’s Frank tutoring Florence Poskitt’s Rita in Black Treacle Theatre’s Educating Rita. Picture: John Saunders
BLACK Treacle Theatre founder and director Jim Paterson has brought together two of York’s finest comedy actors for the first time for Willy Russell’s classic two-hander Educating Rita.
Call it chemistry, call it alchemy, it is inspired casting as Jamie McKeller and Florence Poskitt unite as whisky-soured university lecturer Frank and working-class Liverpool hairdresser Rita White, who wants to do more than change her name from Susan in signing up for an Open University literature course.
Frank, whose poetic flame has burned out, is only taking on Open University classes as a means to funding his chronic need to drink. Behind all too many books in his shabby office are hidden bottles, bringing a regular clink to his day as he numbs his senses at his failure to sustain his early promise as a poet.
Keen to learn, keen to change, keen to challenge: Florence Poskitt’s Literature student, Rita White, looking sceptical in Educating Rita. Picture: John Saunders
McKeller’s Frank is one of those drinkers who remains lucid in thought and expression, bleary eyed yet still articulate, waspish, piercingly perceptive, frustrated and frustrating. He talks of tragedy in Shakespeare being different from what we might call “a tragedy” in everyday life, yet Frank’s inability to change his path, his ways, his boozing, while knowing his destination, is closer to the former than the latter.
Poskitt’s Liverpool lip Rita is the one keen to change, to learn, to reach a state of knowledge and understanding, talking ten to the dozen, smoking feverishly, opinionated, frank, humorous.
She wants to lift Frank out of his doldrums too, but he is more concerned about how her initial individuality, her different way of thinking, is changed essay by essay, session by session, to meet the conventional understanding of critical thinking. You sense that this is Russell’s own despair with the education system, its requirements for common grounding, when Literature studies should lead to original thought.
He thinks, he drinks: Jamie McKeller’s Frank in Black Treacle Theatre’s Educating Rita. Picture: John Saunders
In his educating of Rita, Frank makes her more conventional in the world of gown, not town, where her husband Denny objects to her studies, wanting her to focus on starting a family instead.
In turn, Rita learns that no world is perfect, that a quest for knowledge, an insatiable curiosity, may not provide the answers she wants, but she is still better for now having the knowledge to help her move forwards.
There is light, especially in the combustible humour of Frank and Rita’s clashes of cultural thinking in their tutorials, but there is darkness too, whether in Frank’s embittered demeanour and eloquently arrowed self-loathing or the revelation of the troubles of Rita’s flatmate, Trish.
Educating Rita director Jim Paterson
McKeller, whose theatre work has taken in everything from John Godber’s Bouncers to Shakespeare and Rowntree Players pantomime villains and ugly sisters, gives a masterclass in understated performance: every line and movement weighted with significance, never overplayed in Frank’s reliance on drink to medicate his “absolute disaster” of a stagnating life.
He is superb too at working in tandem with Poskitt’s flighty, effervescent yet increasingly deeper-thinking Rita, a bright spark whose honesty matches the ever-frank Frank as her confidence blossoms in her discovery of art, culture, theatre, herself.
Yet change is as much of a mental minefield as no change. Frank won’t change, Rita will, but in considering “who they are and who they want to be”, choice may still be influenced by class, by circumstance, by whether you are a man or a woman.
So much to learn from each other: Jamie McKeller’s tutor Frank and Florence Poskitt’s student Rita in Educating Rita. Picture: John Saunders
Paterson may set Black Treacle’s production in a hybrid of the 1980s and 1990s, but the themes are as resonant as ever, especially at a time when the price of education – the burden of debt it now brings and the difficulty in finding a job afterwards – is challenging our perception of its purpose.
In the educating of Rita, Willy Russell’s universal play is still championing the possibilities and power of knowledge to change, to broaden horizons, to bring greater freedom of choice, against the tide of the frustratingly linear world of academia .
Black Treacle Theatre presents Educating Rita, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, 7.30pm nightly until Saturday. Box office: https://tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.