Beginnings

Our Artistic Director Chris Honer has directed many productions for the Library Theatre Company but the thrill of beginning work on a new play never diminishes. He shares his thoughts after our first week on Educating Rita

‘O joy of beginning’ says the great Brecht in one of his poems and there’s nothing quite like the frisson of the first day on a new production – a heady mix of excitement and nerves. A lot of questions flick through the director’s mind. Will the team we’ve picked gel? How will the actors respond to the design? Will the read through (and we usually gently read through the play on the first day) suddenly throw up problems in the script that we’ve missed in pre-production work?

Not that you need worry about that with a piece as robust as Educating Rita. Although it’s not been seen in Manchester for over twenty years, it’s been produced all over the world and, of course, famously filmed. Now one of the dangers of producing a play which people know (or think they know) is that you’ll drift into recreating memories of other productions or the movie, rather than making it authentically your own. So on Day Two – and I’m writing this at the start of Day Three – Gillian and Philip read again the first two scenes and we build up a common, concrete understanding of these two fascinating characters’ lives and situations: Frank, university lecturer and disappointed poet, witty, alcoholic, and with more than a touch of self-loathing, and Rita, hairdresser, sparky, funny, yearning for an education that’ll make her life more meaningful.

The questions we tease out vary from the very practical: what time of day is it at the start of the play? (we decide it’s 6pm) to the entirely speculative: Frank refers to T.S. Eliot as Tom so did he know the great poet? (We think Eliot’s firm might have published Frank’s poems back in the fifties.) What are Frank’s poems like? Where has Rita come across the word ‘assonance’? And so on. The devil is, they say, in the detail and finding answers to these questions are essential building blocks in the process of building up an imaginative world which we, and hence we trust you, will believe in when you see the play in performance.

Educating Rita runs from Thu 26 Sep – Sat 12 Oct 2013. You can book tickets online here or from The Lowry Box Office on 0843 208 6010.