Theatre includes: The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Rover, Seven Acts of Mercy, The Winter’s Tale (RSC) East is East (West End) That Day We Sang, Everybody Loves a Winner (Royal Exchange, Manchester) The Rise & Fall of Little Voice (Octagon, Bolton) Waiting for Gateaux (Theatre Royal, Lincoln/UK tour) Zombie Prom (Landor) Acorn Antiques (UK tour) Spending Frank (Slyboots) Shakers (Gambolling Arena) The Glass Menagerie, Don’t Dress for Dinner, Lost in Yonkers (SDC Productions). Nadia, Puja Nights, Behind the Green Curtain. Television includes: No Offence, In the Club I & II, Breaking the Code, Stella, Moving On, Kitten Chic, Miranda, In with the Flynns.įilm includes: A.K.A. Theatre includes: Educating Rita (Hull Truck) East is East (West End) All Our Daughters (New Vic/UK tour) Small Fish Big Cheese (Unicorn) Don Juan in Love, The Wind in the Willows (The Scoop Air Theatre). Television includes: Will Savage in Hollyoaks, Jamie Bowman Coronation Street, Casualty, Doctors, Inspector George Gently, Joe Maddison’s War, Midsomer Murders, Babs, Porters. Theatre includes: Crocodiles (Royal Exchange, Manchester) Wallenstein (Chichester Festival) Treasure Island (West End). It’s touring September 2017 – February 2018. Meet the cast of this major revival of Andrea Dunbar’s seminal play. Lenny Henry handled the problem with great dignity (as did Lynch), left the stage briefly, then returned to give an altogether more lively performance, what had been a competent picture of disillusion becoming infused with palpable emotion.Samantha Robinson, Taj Atwal, Sally Bankes, David Walker, James Atherton, Gemma Dobson. One tutorial unwound for the actor on press night. The once uncoordinated intelligence focuses and becomes independent of the teacher.īuffong also provides space to see the major advance in Rita’s essay-writing comes from the unseen summer school rather than Frank’s tutorials – where her changing dress-sense is more evidently displayed. Though Literature lecturer Frank, with his pre-packed middle-age dissolution, drinking and failed relationships, compares himself to Frankenstein, a scene where Rita pulls her chair closer to his desk and tries-out a ghastly Liverpool posh-speak relates the action to Bernard Shaw’s famous “not bloody likely” drawing-room scene from Pygmalion.Īnd Buffong’s production shows, on Shavian lines, the consequence of educating Rita. Lynch’s Rita smashes out of her doll’s-house existence, turning dissatisfaction with her mundane breezeblock-park existence into joy at realising she can make choices, becoming a constructive version of Dennis Cain in Russell’s One for the Road (which he revised shortly after writing Rita). Like Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, Rita realises her life’s been planned for her by others. Yet a different Ibsen play comes thematically to mind. One of the best is about Peer Gynt, which is referred to recurrently. And this Rita asserts its Liverpool identity in every syllable Lashana Lynch utters – and might come, during the run, to utter with less reliance on an excitable high vocal register.īut she incarnates Rita as a life-force, instinctively optimistic, and gives the jokes a firm character base. Lectureships are no longer safe jobs for life, while Rita moves easily between jobs in a city on the verge, we now know, of mass unemployment and strife. Now, programming Michael Buffong’s revival in the Minerva allows us to see the serious side of Rita. It was Chichester’s Artistic Director Jonathan Church who first coupled Willy Russell’s comedy with David Mamet’s university-set two-hander Oleanna in 1996, when he ran Salisbury Playhouse. Hymn to education and a vivacious woman who never wears the same dress twice but always sparkles. Minerva Theatre Oaklands Park PO19 6AP To 25 July 2015.
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