Educating Rita, Minack Theatre, review: a charming classic that slyly announced the Thatcher years
There’s common-or-garden al fresco performance, and then there’s sitting at the Minack Theatre, on grass and stone tiers, upon the cliffs a few miles from Land’s End. Most summers, it’s worth the detour down a windy, narrow Cornish road.
But this year, amid a desert of theatrical activity elsewhere, this little oasis has received an extra fillip to its programme in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, a top-end touring show that was scheduled to play major regional venues until Covid-19 struck.
At first glance, no interloper in this spectacular setting could be more incongruous than the wistfully comic story – first aired 40 years ago, and made into an award-winning 1983 film – of a young Liverpudlian hairdresser who goes on a journey of scholastic awakening under the guidance of a middle-aged, drink-addled Eng Lit lecturer.
An array of bookcases has been mustered on stage, along with a sturdy desk and armchair, but behind in-built stone-arched windows lie glimpses of the surging sea – against which the flowering of Russell’s heroine might seem paltry. The Tempest was the inaugural production at the Minack in 1932, and the place seems to demand Sturm und Drang.
But the theatre’s founding mother, Rowena Cade, would have approved of Rita, a garrulous lass who’s avoiding child-rearing and has resolved – against her husband’s wishes – to become “the sort of educated woman who knows the difference between Oscar Wilde and Kim Wilde”. Thanks to a performance by Jessica Johnson of tenacious and flinty spirit, the unreal staging starts to make sense as a perch from which Rita can spread her wings – to the satisfaction-cum-forlorn dismay of her tutor, Frank.
Today, their dynamic – a male pedagogue implants his wisdom – may seem like an old-school stereotype. And Stephen Tompkinson, fending off the wind on the first night of Max Roberts’s production by paper-weighting his documents, could do with making Frank’s advisories sound less like bellowing mansplaining.
But he shares with Johnson a likeability, presence and focus that keeps you watching, and refraining from easy judgement. His marriage, too, has hit the rocks, while his bedraggled air, as he glugs whisky from a mug, lets you know that the lovely Rita will gain the upper hand. Reading between the lines, Frank is less a throwback to paternalistic pomp than an early 1980s harbinger of masculine entitlement’s decline and fall as – feminist or no – Mrs Thatcher advanced centre-stage.
Until August 29. Info: minack.com
