Willy Russell is an English dramatist best known for Educating Rita (1986). He was born in Whiston, near Liverpool in 1947 to a working class family; his father worked in a factory and his mother was a nurse and then in a warehouse. After he left school he became a hairdresser and took other odd jobs, such as a warehouseman. Being a hairdresser was, in his own admittance, “a job I didn’t understand and didn’t like,” and he began to write songs and sketches for the...
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Educating Rita is a play about change and transformation. Susan White, a working class girl, wants to escape the trappings of the class system and become “educated”, thinking that this will allow her to “sing a better song“. By the end of the...
Transitions allow individuals to embrace new perspectives of the world we occupy. Willy Russell’s comedic stage play "Educating Rita", written in 1979 at a time when education was being made more accessible to the working class, seeks to...
