EDUCATING RITA. York to 9 March.

York

EDUCATING RITA
by Willy Russell

Theatre Royal Studio To 9 March 2002
Runs 2hr 45min One interval

TICKETS 01904 623568
Review Timothy Ramsden 15 February

A mix of the over-emphatic and the vibrant in York's studio revival.York's artistic director Damian Cruden says he's enjoyed directing for the first time in the Theatre's new studio space. Let's hope he'll be back, with the confidence to treat it as something more than a foreshortened main-stage. The set (there's only an assistant design credit) is entirely competent and catches a sense of 1980 well enough, but it looks like a large-stage set crammed in, and doesn't exploit the audience/stage dynamics.

Sitting on the middle of the three rows, I also found the performances over-projected; not too loud but at times very formal for the proximity and clean lines this exciting, intimate space offers.

That's especially the case with Robert Pickavance as Frank. And Frank's a character who needs all the help an actor can give. Maybe in 1980 he passed as a poet manque. In these performance-managed days, he comes over as a boozy, mentally ill-disciplined mediocrity. The actor's tendency to underline (as opposed to merely express) meaning with voice tone, particularly as sentence endings loom, only makes Frank seem, frankly, more self-pitying than ever. Rita's right not to go to the pub with him; he must be hell when he's truly maudlin.

Andrina Carroll's OU-enrolled hairdresser – loyally shifted in York from west of the Pennines to Tyneside – at first seems very self-aware and sexually provocative. At 26, and with a possessive little-woman husband, she'd be more cautious when meeting a man alone. Maybe Rita's over-awed, or thinks it's how the educated classes behave, but it doesn't quite fit.

Which everything that follows does. The determination that goes into her re-write of the famous one-liner on staging Peer Gynt (Russell catches an early stage of Rita's developing understanding beautifully in the moment), the measured way she considers her options – her options - for spending a holiday, all the way to the final moment, beautifully controlled, when this lively Galatea, with just a pair of scissors, starts to reshape her Pygmalion; these are memorable examples from a performance whose every tone, glance and facial flicker show that Rita's continuing place in the repertory is not just down to a small-cast and single set.

Rita: Andrina Carroll
Frank: Robert Pickavance

Director: Damian Cruden
Assistant Designer: Lynette Hartgill
Lighting: Dominic Bell

2002-02-18 13:22:48