Educating Rita
Comparison of the book and the film

“Educating Rita” is a play written by Willy Russel in 1979 that takes place in Northern England at the Open University. To give a short introduction of the play, we meet the two main characters, Rita and Frank. Frank teaches literature and poetry on the Open University, where Rita also wants to learn. She finds herself as being boring, and instead of being a hairdresser, she wants to succeed in what she really wants to do – get herself to know as a person by doing literature and by writing essays.

A book and a film are hardly ever exactly the same, often because of the setting and locations, scenes and the number of characters we meet during the play. In the book “Educating Rita” by Willy Russel, we meet a number of characters who have some kind of a relationship to either Rita or Frank. For instance we meet Frank’s girl, Julia, Rita’s husband, Denny and Rita’s family. In the film we meet the same characters including several more as for instance the singing people at the pub besides Rita’s mother and father, the students at the Open University, Julia’s lover etc. One of the reasons, why we meet several more characters in the film is because, it is much easier to put characters into the scenes, even though they are not important or do not say anything. The characters make you visualize the following situations more clear, while the book can only give you a picture of what is written, and of course your own imagination. The setting and locations are the same as well; there are a lot more locations in the film than in the book. In the book we hardly even read about other locations than the room, where Frank teaches Rita. The corresponding locations in the film are more expressive, and the environment is more significant. We can visualize the locations a lot better as for instance how the school looks like indoor and outdoor. A scene that appears a lot earlier in the film is where Rita is getting ready to visit Frank and Julia. She is dressing up, asking Denny to come with her, going out to buy some wine and reaching the bus in the rainy weather. It makes a huge difference to the meaning of the play, where we get this scene to know. What also makes a huge difference is the music. In the film we get to hear music corresponding to the scenes, which improves the meaning and the mood of the situations. Other scenes that appear in the film but not in the book are Julia’s affair with one of Franks familiar. In the film it creates voltage and a read thread, while we hardly hear anything about an affair in the book.

I definitely think that the film was better than the book. The book was not that descriptive, and one’s knowledge was limited, while the film was a lot more expressive and created some kind of a mood in the play and improved the voltage.