Willy Russell’s comedy about collision between class and culture, Educating Rita, comes to Oldham Coliseum this October.
Frank, a disillusioned career academic, becomes a tutor for the Open University, mainly to help pay for his prodigious booze habit. He doesn’t know what to expect, but he certainly wasn’t expecting Rita.
She’s a down-to-earth hairdresser looking to make a better life for herself through English Literature. She doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows she wants more than she has.
Both in and out of the classroom, a relationship develops between them. Rita falls for the world of bohemian privilege that is now open to her and Frank falls more than a little in love with Rita’s free spirit.
The Coliseum’s production will be directed by Iqbal Khan, who was last in Oldham for 2012’s Manchester Theatre Award winning Snookered. It will star Steven Elliott (Da Vinci’s Demons) as Frank alongside Scarlett Brookes as Rita and runs from October 15-31.