![]() Remember how good Walters was as the ballet teacher in Billy Elliot? I have never met the lady in real life, but I would take a bet that not-thought-through and boss-before-you-think are part of her natural attributes. Our Rita is Julie Walters who is Twiggy size, exceptionally pretty as petite alone can sometimes be, and as bossy as Margaret Thatcher, even before she has begun to think about what or who she is bossing. All this may not be easy at first (and increasing more difficult in a post-covid world of online university tuition). Therefore, immediately proclaim your folly (the university pays you to do this) and immediately regain the respect of the student. Should you find yourselves going down the wrong path, remember that this path has been swanned into by you. It requires practice to sense which path you should be going down. Feel your way into guidance without judgement. If you are foolish enough to make a judgement on a student’s take, you are the looser. Your listening will be superior to your speaking at this point in the operation: when to intervene, when not. Over to you now professor: you must invite the student to explore and expand supposed irrelevances – still keeping your role as guide gently involved. They will babble (like Rita) prize irrelevances on the discourse. Those students will go all-out to be educated, just like Rita. If you are lucky (most of the time) your student will be educating you in ways you could only previously imagine. Anyone who has been involved in university teaching will tell you that the rewards for the teacher outweigh those for the student. More than threequarters of director Lewis Gilbert’s Educating Rita is exactly that: professor aims to point student in the right direction. Be warned that the English subtitles do not always hit the bullseye of what these Neapolitans say.) (Watch on YouTube Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini to see this art at its finest. Just think of the bathos of Naples’ leading screen clown, Toto. For it to be convincing the art must be taken seriously. Playing out farce for them is as natural as breathing. (Margaret Rutherford, Alastair Sim, Peter Ustinov, Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin are others). [Pergolesi wrote a charming one-act opera, La serva padrone, which remains in repertory.įew actors become more of themselves in every role they play. Unwittingly (stay with me on the plot for a moment) they swap roles: the don becomes the student and the student the don: what the Neapolitans call the serva padrona (master trans-mutes into student and vice versa) – the very nerve centre of commedia dell’arte farce. And both lead characters – Susan ‘Rita’ White (Julie Walters) and Oxford don, Dr Frank Bryant (Michael Caine) become more of their real-life-selves in what must function as a plot. A bit like being pleasantly drunk.īooze is so centre stage in Rita that it almost takes over as the dominant character. This is a team that interplay each the others’ skills. There is lots of fun ‘music’ to be enjoyed in Entertaining Rita, though none of it comes through instruments or voices. And what fun the team have with this romp. A musical comparison is easier to grasp – when we hear all the right notes in all the right places: but with no music.Ĭonfusion as artistry in fact. That sounds highfaluting – a case where dictionary precision could take us as far away as possible from the craft considered. A near magic formula for the raw, native skills of writer, director, and actors. The other, equally important half of Entertaining Rita is in the dictionary’s entry for entertainment, another ME root, invoking amusement or enjoyment and – simultaneously – hospitality. whose stage version also had the same leading actors as the film. The OED on education refers an inquirer through a Middle English (ME) root of educe meaning to bring out or develop (something latent or potential): very much Willy Russell’s territory in his melodramatic farce of 1980 at the Royal Shakespeare Company which in turn became an even more successful (1983) film of the same name.
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