Description: A single-volume re-issue of the well-known play Educating Rita. The story centres on a working-class Liverpudlian woman's hunger for education.
Brief description: One of the most-produced writers of his time, Willy Russell (b. Whiston, Liverpool, 23 Aug. 1947) is a playwright and songwriter. He has written a large number of highly successful plays and musicals for stage and TV including John, Paul, George, Ringo ... and Bert (1974), Breezeblock Park (1975), One for the Road (1976), Our Day Out (television 1977; stage musical version 1983), Stags and Hens (1978; filmed as Dancin' thru the Dark, 1990), Educating Rita (1979), Blood Brothers(1981; musical version 1983), and Shirley Valentine (1986). His novel, The Wrong Boy, was published to great acclaim in 2000.
Review Quotes:
"Russell plays don't date, any more than Jane Austen novels - Rita is a universal figure: any of us in a time of transition, increasingly uncomfortable in our old world but, as yet, unproven in the new." --Libby Purves, The Times, 28.07.10
"Willy Russell is a dramatist of exceptional warmth and humanity." --Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, 28.07.10 "Russell, too easily dismissed as a slavish populist, here seems a cherishably perceptive observer of the vagaries of social class and sexual politics." --Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, 28.07.10