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영어

English playwright Willy Russell (1947 - )’s plays often concern alienated female protagonists who dream of escaping their confining societies in the post-industrial England of the 1970s and 1980s. His most famous play, Educating Rita (1980), embodies this thematic preoccupation. Despite its status as the 1980 winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy, Educating Rita is essentially a drama, relating the story of an unfulfilled working-class hairdresser, Rita, who aspires to study English literature in an Open University setting in order to become educated—and through this process, she hopes, improve her self-esteem and expand her career and lifestyle options. During the course of the play, which unfolds entirely in the university office of Rita’s alcoholic tutor, the disillusioned but likeable Frank, Russell raises important questions for his audience regarding identity, literature, and the nature and purpose of education. Russell’s play also emphasizes the value of experiential education (e.g. self-discovery on the part of the learner rather than being merely told what to think) over a more teacher-centered approach. At the same time, Russell suggests through Rita’s dramatic transformation of identity from a wisecracking neophyte in love with the idea of learning to a much more sophisticated connoisseur of literature that, perhaps inevitably, the qualities of originality and enthusiasm that truly motivated students initially bring to their learning can become muted during the process of becoming formally “educated.”