Alfred Hickling
Octagon, Bolton
Jessica Baglow is radiant as the gobby but intellectually insatiable hairdresser who spars with her boozy Open University lecturer.
If one thing has altered in the 37 years since Willy Russell wrote Educating Rita, it’s that students now hold their tutors accountable. These days it costs on average over £5,000 per year for the kind of Open University course that Russell’s intellectually insatiable hairdresser Rita embarks upon; and time and again you wonder what sort of value for money she’s getting, since her supervisor, Frank, is so patently a tenured waste of space. It’s no surprise that the governing body eventually packs him off on gardening leave in Australia; rather, you wonder what took them so long?
To his credit, David Birrell does manage to flip Frank’s alcoholic self-pity into a form of inverted heroism. Accused of falling off the rostrum mid-lecture, he retorts: “Yes, but I went down talking and I was still talking when I got up again.” And it is fascinating to see the spark of engagement that periodically lights up his eyes when he springs to his bookshelves and withdraws the volume concealing a bottle of Famous Grouse.
It’s not often that this modest two-hander offers much to look at, yet Elizabeth Newman’s joint production with Derby theatre has an imposing visual impact – the scuffed parquet, mullioned windows and cracked leather of Ciaran Bagnall’s set enables you to view academia the way Rita sees it, as a kind of seductively erudite alternative universe. And it quickly becomes a cosmos with Jessica Baglow’s radiant Rita at its centre. She has, to use a non-academic term, quite a gob on her; her Pygmalion-esque initiation to the world of critical theory and wholefood bistros is a wonder to behold.
•At Octagon theatre, Bolton, until 11 February. Box office: 01204 520661. Then at Derby theatre, 17 February-11 March. Box office: 01332 593939.
Alfred Hickling
( credits: www.guardian.co.uk) (picture credits: www.guardian.co.uk )