EDUCATING RITA

Can the classroom meetings of a university lecturer and a student, devoted to the analysis of poems, novels and dramas, contain such a huge load of humor, drama and passion that they become the content of a tragicomedy, considered a classic of contemporary theater?

Since its premiere in London in 1980, the fate of the protagonists of Willy Russell's play Educating Rita — literature professor Frank (Mirosław Baka) and hairdresser Rita (Maria Dębska), who enrolls for his lectures at the Open University, has aroused heated emotions in hundreds of thousands of spectators in dozens of countries on all continents.

What is the secret of this stunning success of a modest, two-person play with an almost whimsical plot unfolding in the same office, during fourteen class meetings devoted to the study of literary analysis?

The short answer: literature in educating Rita is just an excuse to talk about life, a conversation in which each of the viewers finds a mass of their own experiences, often funny, even comic, but also painful and dramatic. Russell speaks to the viewer with the same amount of respect, but also sincerity with which he treats his characters. Their meetings become the story of two fascinating personalities, their passions, dreams and fears, their search for love, their hard-won victories and bitter disappointments. But also the story of the “paradise lost” that our modernity has become.