the text of Educating Rita by Willy Russell.

When the play was written there was a still a cultural divide between the uneducated (as in no higher education) working class and the cultural and educated upper class but higher education was slowly being made available to the masses.

This was partly due to Open University (OU) with provided a university education to those who normally would have not been able to go due to employment or the fact that they might feel they wouldn't fit in, like Rita, because of the cultural differences.

Rita feels she needs an education to fill her life, as she knows that something in her life is not right and so she turns to the part of a life she doesn't have -education and knowledge of culture- to fill the gap.

However as we find out this is not necessarily what she is missing, but in her search for an education she finds 'a new Rita', she even changes her name back to Susan. Susan is Rita's real name, however when she started OU she changed it to Rita after Rita Mae Brown, someone who she thinks writes literature, but in fact writes "pulp-fiction" stories, because at this time she thinks all books are literature- this shows the cultural diff

In the play Rita talks about sitting in the pub while her family and Denny are singing along to a song on the jukebox and then her mum starts to cry and says "Surely there are better songs to sing", I feel this is a turning point for Rita, that is never really shown in the staged play, it does however seem very significance when seen in the film, where you see Rita and her family in the pub, and then in another scenes you can compare it with what Rita sees when she invited to Franks house-party, which in the play you only hear about her being invited to and then the discussion afterwards when Frank asks her why she didn't come.

Furthermore, I feel that this enhances the way how Frank acts when he is not with Rita, but with the other students, whom he doesn't like, and doesn't try to like. In Sc.3 Act.2 Rita asks Frank if he will be sacked and Frank tells her "For dismissal it'd have to be nothing less than buggering the bursar", although this is funny at the time, the film illuminates this when, in Sc.7, Act.2. (or thereabouts as it is only mentioned in the book), Rita walks in on Frank packing away his books, when she asks why he says he was being sent away to Australia, Rita replies, "Did y'bugger the bursar?" "Metaphorically." He replies. In the film you see Frank very drunk standing outside the bursar's window, shouting at him - whiskey bottle in hand-until he falls asleep on the lawn of the university. This is very effective on the film, and helps you build up the idea of Frank when he is drunk.

The fact that the stage audience meet with only two characters in the play is limiting in the sense that a lot of information is told from only one point of view. Denny, Rita's husband strongly opposes her spending time on education. He wants her to have a baby and become a housewife and throughout most of the play he is trying make her quit what she is doing. In the play Rita tells Frank that Denny has burnt all her books, and again the action is retold. Although Rita makes it sound bad, when it is seen in the movie we actually get to see the anger and frenzy

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1402
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)