Le Figaro magazine
Samedi 22 décembre
· L'Éducation
de Rita
La souris et le matou
Plus anglo-saxon que cet ersatz
de Pygmalion, tu meurs… Tout y est : le rapport d'âge,
le rapport maître-élève, le sentiment mezzo
voce, l'ascenseur social, le campus universitaire, etc. La pièce
de Willy Russell est solide et bien bâtie, elle joue sur
des ressorts qui font mouche, et le public lui a toujours accordé
ses faveurs. Adriana Santini nous en livre une excellente adaptation,
vive, vraie, fine, jeune. Elle la joue avec ces mêmes qualités,
dirigée par Chrsitophe Lidon, en compagnie de son père
Pierre Santini qui n'a qu'à laisser filer son talent dans
un rôle en or. Un vrai plaisir.
Philippe Tesson
Comédie dramatique de
Willy Russell, mise en scène de Christophe Lidon, avec
Pierre Santini et Adriana Santini.
C'est l'histoire de Rita...
une jeune coiffeuse pour dames de 26 ans. Rita veut changer de
vie. Ce qu'elle souhaite : TOUT apprendre. Elle veut étudier,
se cultiver, changer de vie...
Elle est reçue aux cours particuliers de "l'université
pour tous". Ce sera Frank son professeur de littérature.
Lui, il est alcoolique, désenchanté, triste, mélancolique...
Bref, Frank à première vue n'a pas l'air très
enclin à prendre en charge l'éducation de Rita.
Au fur et à mesure de
son apprentissage Rita, cette jeune femme pleine de vie qui ne
se démonte pas, va prendre confiance en elle. Elle en
aura même plus que son maître et fait une ascension
intellectuelle fulgurante, ce qui n'est pas pour plaire à
Frank bien sûr...
Adriana Santini, dans le rôle
de Rita, s'empare complètement du personnage et de son
temps, notamment dans le langage très jeun's et sans demi
mesure. Le propos lui est toujours même encore plus d'actualité
: le droit et l'accès à l'éducation pour
tous. Un sujet de société qui nous concerne tous,
et en premier lieu... Rita qui le défend avec fougue :
"Je suis coiffeuse, pas chirurgien esthétique. La
plupart de mes clientes viennent pour changer. Mais quand on
veut changer, il faut le faire de l'intérieur."
Toutes les saynètes
se passent dans le bureau typique d'un professeur d'université
comme Frank. Bureau en bois désordonné, un tapis
persan, une bibliothèque (en jeu de cubes) gigantesque
qui se transforme et se retransforme au cours de la pièce.
Empilés, déplacés, renversés, retournés,
voilà ce que les livres subiront, et c'est ainsi que cette
bibliothèque imaginaire prend vie.
Dans cet espace du savoir et
de la culture, Frank le professeur règne en maître.
Il est plus qu'un simple professeur il est le guide, le mentor
de Rita. Pierre Santini, de par son charisme, sa voix, son assurance
et un jeu de comédien à vous couper le souffle,
donne une dimension encore plus profonde à son personnage.
Il met en valeur de façon naturelle les faiblesses et
les peurs de Frank du fait que Rita bouscule sa vie et ses habitudes.
D'un autre côté,
Rita bouscule également sa vie. Elle ne supporte plus
ses clientes, son mari se croit cocufié avec Tchekhov...
Bref, tout se ballotte autour d'elle à cause de cette
envie dévorante de savoir.
Adriana Santini a un pep's
d'enfer, une présence scénique sans pareille, et
ce, du début jusqu'à la fin de la pièce.
Elle donne à son personnage un petit plus, quelque chose
qui la rend différente et, en même temps, si touchante
et forte à l'intérieur. De toute façon,
coûte que coûte, elle a parié avec sa conscience
qu'elle irait jusqu'au bout de cette histoire même si elle
doit y perdre quelques plumes...
Un pièce pleine de messages
et de problèmes contemporains qui caractérisent
notre société : la quête de soi, de sa propre
recherche de savoir. Sublime parcours de vie qui remet sur le
tapis un questionnement sur notre société et sur
sa vie tout simplement !
TB - froggydelight.com
Educating Rita ****
EDINBURGH FESTIVAL
Sweet on the Grassmarket
It's difficult to do Educating Rita badly. The 80 minutes crackle
away with line after line of wit, insight and more layers than
your aunty's wedding cake. The boy Russell can certainly write.
Oscar-winningly good on celluloid, it's better on the stage,
and this production doesn't disappoint.
The venue might look and feel
like a converted hotel function suite (which it is), but this
is forgotten as soon as Rita bursts onto the stage in a jolting
blur of colour and noise. The actress is near-perfect, the odd
first-night slip easily overlooked as the vowels, pitch and timing
take over.
The actor playing Frank seems
remarkably young to take on the role of an alcohol-soaked disillusioned
middle-age lecturer with a stuttering career as a poet and a
broken marriage behind him. “I wish you'd walked through
that door 20 years ago” says Frank to Rita, at which point
it's difficult not to notice that 20 years ago this Frank would
have been in short trousers and school tie.
Still, as problems go, that's
minor. A production well worth missing the first couple of rounds
of the pub quiz for, and your mum will love it.
Chris Ozóg -
Festonline
TWO TALES OF ONE CITY
Educating Rita ****
Byre Theatre, St Andrews
By some strange piece of synchronicity,
the image of Liverpool’s great waterfront skyline has been
haunting Scottish theatre in the week of the announcement that
the city is to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. Hurry
along to the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, and there you’ll
see it, hazy in daylight or outlined in stars, in the spectacular
backdrop to the touring Bill Kenwright production of Blood Brothers.
And up at the Byre in St Andrews, here it is again, spread like
a decorative border all across the programme for Ken Alexander’s
new production of Educating Rita.
The man behind both shows,
of course, is Liverpool’s leading dramatic bard Willy Russell,
ladies’ hairdresser turned playwright, and extraordinary
man of letters; and his work certainly offers plenty of food
for thought about the challenges facing Liverpool writers in
the run-up to 2008. It’s clear that part of the huge energy
that inspired both the Glasgow and Liverpool bids to become European
City of Culture comes from the impulse to give a voice to those
who feel marginalised, discarded or abused by the onward march
of history; to the people of big cities sucked into being by
the economic whirlwind of the Industrial Revolution and then
left on the scrapheap - and often mocked, insulted and stereotyped,
too - in the second half of the 20th century. But the key question
- one never quite resolved during Glasgow’s 1990 year in
the limelight - is how to voice that experience, as Bill Bryden
memorably did in his huge production of The Ship at Govan, without
succumbing to self-pity, and the kind of blame-shifting victim-mentality
that leaves people feeling not more powerful for having told
their story, but less so.
And in that sense, these two
Willy Russell shows currently playing in Scotland offer some
interesting contrasts, not only in style but in attitude to the
people whose lives they describe.
Blood Brothers - first seen
in Liverpool in 1982, and reviewed here last week - remains a
passionate, haunting and hugely popular modern tragedy, a big
hit musical with a rare backbeat of strong, meaty drama and class
politics. But its heroine, working-class mother-of-nine Mrs Johnstone,
is portrayed throughout as a helpless victim of her fate, although
an instantly recognisable and attractive one; she’s fearful,
superstitious, self-deceiving and doomed to pay a terrible price
for the one positive decision she ever makes.
Russell’s great comedy
Educating Rita, though, takes an entirely different approach.
As Alexander’s excellent Byre production demonstrates, it’s
one that gives the play a surprisingly contemporary edge, 23
years on from its first London production. The difference, of
course, is that its protagonist Rita - a 26-year-old Liverpool
hairdresser who has decided to branch out into an Open University
course on English literature - comes from a working-class background
but, like most real human beings, is not wholly defined by that
class identity.
For one thing, as Russell shrewdly
observes, her life-chances are shaped by gender as much as class.
Rita can take up her Open University course, and try to change
her life, precisely because the Pill has given her the control
over her own fertility that Mrs Johnstone lacked.
And for another, Rita has the
key human ability to think, argue and imagine her way into a
thousand different worlds, and to offer a critique of the people
and culture she comes from, as well as a passionate understanding
of their problems.
In one of her key speeches,
Rita articulates her sense that these problems are not only economic,
but cultural and spiritual, and that providing top-down jobs
for people thrown onto the scrapheap is, at best, only a short-term
solution; it’s a thought that might act as a mission statement
for the whole 2008 project, designed as it is to work from the
bottom up, to unleash the creativity of the people, and to help
free them at last from that old sense of dependency and powerlessness.
Up at St Andrews, Anita Vettesse
and Richard Addison make a fine, passionate job of exploring
the relationship between Rita and her disillusioned tutor Frank,
capturing both the huge vitality of Rita’s language and
persona, and her desperate need to transcend it. The production,
staged on a gorgeous open-book set by Rebecca Minto, also raises
some disturbing questions about what has happened, in the last
two decades, to the shabbily tolerant academic world Russell
portrays, and to the kind of liberal education that Rita experiences.
In that sense, as a political
play, Educating Rita strikes an unusually mature balance between
celebrating the power of individuals to take their fate into
their own hands and recognising the structures - from the free
availability of contraception to the presence of a liberal education
system - that make that self-empowerment so much more possible.
If Liverpool 2008, like Glasgow
1990, is to be partly about enriching the debate on what kind
of society we need to be in the 21st century, then that fine
balance at the heart of Russell’s most popular play seems
to me as good a starting-place as any.
Educating Rita runs until 28
June; Blood Brothers is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until
14 June
JOYCE McMILLAN
- The Scotsman
Wednesday, 11th June
2003
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