It's great to see good live theatre at the Courtyard and this week we have it.
Willy Russell's Educating Rita is a rights of passage piece in many ways.
In it the playwright explores the desire for, and the distortion of, 'education' as society dictates - the main characters, Frank and Rita, each wanting what the other has.
The audience itself is a pawn in Russell's game as he mocks the theatre of theatre. But it's a lively piece and hugely entertaining.
Estelle van Warmelo's sensitive touch is rewarded and the characters metamorphose before our eyes.
Frank's more subtle shift from careworn tutor to a man starting anew on foreign soil; Rita's cataclysmic transformation from frustrated hairdresser to literary aesthete.
It's a comedy, but the humour is dark. So many questions about 'the bigger picture' in such lightness of context.
Stephen McGann's 20-odd year career lends itself to the weight of Frank's tiredness. You feel it in every muscle twitch.
Zoie Kennedy's Rita is less complex - she comes at it fresh-faced and quirky. Her outfits mark the seasons change in Rita's growth. We go from a coiffured Meg Ryan to Virginia Wolf via Diane Keaton. Curly perms and bad make-up are omitted but her delivery is spot on - if not a little lacking in gravel at times.
Russell's 26-year-old Rita has really lived and I didn't get that sense of desperation here, but maybe it will come. I wanted to feel the dye in Rita's thumbprints because that's what she's so desperate to get rid of.
Julie Harries
l Educating Rita runs to May 28 at Hereford Courtyard.
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