On Comedy
“I can’t do male company. It all becomes about the latest car: 'Did you really come down the A6?’ It’s
about things. Put a group of women in a room and it’s about what’s in here.” He points to his heart.
With Shirley, it was as if he was the ventriloquist’s dummy from the moment she opened her mouth.
“I wrote the line, 'I like a glass of wine when I’m doing the cooking.’ Then she turned around and said,
'Don’t I, wall?’ And at that moment the play was born. And you knew immediately that’s how she
survived. When I was writing her, I became witty. I remember when I wrote, 'He kissed me stretch
marks’, and then she suddenly said, 'Aren’t men full of s---?’ And I fell off the chair laughing. It wasn’t
as if I knew where I was going when I wrote that riff. I was just the conduit.”
From an interview with Willy Russell By Jasper Rees (The Telegraph, 24th March, 2010)
For Russell, the comedy arises naturally out of the circumstances surrounding the dramatic situation
and are part of the inherent make-up of the characters. The play is not written primsrily for laughs. He
says of himself:
“I am not a witty man . . . but what happens is, if I get the characters right, the wit emerges out of
the characters. As I say, I’m not a funny man, I love wit, I love witty people and I really admire them,
but I am not one myself.”
It is true to say that there is plenty of humour in Educating Rita, but there is also a vein of seriousness
that runs through the play. One of the defining characteristics of a genuine comedy is that there
should be a happy ending . . .
The quick-witted retort for which Liverpudlians are well-known.
The comedy in Educating Rita is a consequence of the narrative.
Extracts from Lewis, Steve (2007) Introduction to Educating Rita: Bloomsbury
(Quotes from Russell himself are in bold, those from Steve Lewis are in Roman)
On writing about women
As for how a man can write about women so convincingly, Russell doesn’t claim any magic formula,
simply skill and intuition.
“I’m as happy writing about a teenage boy from Manchester [in his novel The Wrong Boy] as I am
with the female parts. You just have to dare to know about whoever you’re writing about.”
From a 2004 interview with Willy Russell with Rob Kinsman (http://www.queenstheatre.co.uk/archive/2004/ facetofacewithwillyrussell.htm)
Educating Rita became a world-wide hit, and spawned an acclaimed film version starring Michael
Caine and Julie Walters. Together with his one-woman monologue, Shirley Valentine, it has
established Willy Russell as an exceptionally skilful writer of complex female characters. Although he
claims that many other male writers, from Ayckbourn to Shakespeare, have also created memorable
female parts, he acknowledges that his celebrated title characters were somewhat unusual when they
were written.
“Until then, there were not many theatre plays where a working-class woman was given the whole
scope of the stage and a full emotional journey. It was because they were a different kind of woman
to those we were used to seeing onstage.”
Extracts from Lewis, Steve (2007) Introduction to Educating Rita: Bloomsbury
On structure
There is an enormous step change between the two acts of the play. The interval therefore has a real
significance . . .
The action plays in more or less “real” time and is continuous.
One of the constraints of a single-set, two-character naturalistic drama like Educating Rita is the fact
that reported speech becomes the main means of conveying events and information from the off-set
world. It is testimony to Russell’s skill as a dramatist that this is achieved in a way that is both
dramatically convincing and occurs naturally in the dialogue without sounding contrived.
Extracts from Lewis, Steve (2007) Introduction to Educating Rita: Bloomsbury
(Quotes from Russell himself are in bold, those from Steve Lewis are in Roman)
On narrative
“The story, the narrative . . . is to me all-important. A story, like a song, can transcend barriers of
language, class and race. A story is a difficult thing to make. It is a primal and magic thing and
cannot be made by those who have turned their back on simplicity.”
Extracts from Lewis, Steve (2007) Introduction to Educating Rita: Bloomsbury
On context
By his own admission, Willy Russell writes from his imagination rather than making notes and relying
on research, which he sees as getting in the way of the business of telling the story through his
characters. His writing is informed by his experiences and influenced by the unique social conditions
and people that living in a city like Liverpool provides.
Extracts from Lewis, Steve (2007) Introduction to Educating Rita: Bloomsbury
Reviews of the 1989 film and the 2010 performance at the Menier Chocolate
Factory
Educating Rita could be seen to be about: “… the meaning of life [or] . . . simply a marvellous play,
painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairytale with a quizzical,
half-happy ending”
From Willy Russell: In a Class of His Own. John Peter (Sunday Times, 1989)
The play is not only funny, it is also moving. Russell, like all the best folk artists, holds up familiar
aspects of life for inspection and enjoyment by an audience he knows inside out. He is an instinctive
feminist --nothing to do with metropolitan fringe theatre or vegetarianism - and his work often, as
here, gains richness from exposing Liverpudlian flippancy, chauvinism and defensive smart-alecking to
a radical desire for people to improve their lives and see themselves with more dignity. This, in the
end, is what Shirley Valentine achieves.
Review of the play, Liverpool Echo (www.willyrussell.com)
A heroine whose dialogue can be packaged in a tiny publicity pamphlet called ''The Wit and Wisdom
of Shirley Valentine'' is probably spouting shallow aphorisms rather than anything witty or wise.
Banality is precisely the problem with ''Shirley Valentine,'' the one-woman stage play that has been
turned into a misguided, fully cast film.
By CARYN JAMES New York Times, August 30, 1989
Hence an improbable plot device by which her feminist friend wins a holiday for two in Greece, and
Shirley, after much guilt, doubt and abuse from her plankish husband (Hill), decides to go. But the
virtue of Russell's writing is that, for all the cracks, occasional duff lines, and tendency to simplify and
stereotype, few can match his ability to make us laugh, cry and ultimately care.
Review of the film from Time Out Boston website.
It would be easy to dismiss Shirley and Rita as products of a distant age when women's choices were
fewer. Easy, but dead wrong, as Rita herself might say. Despite the advances of feminism, the Shirleys
and the Ritas are still with us, over 20 years since Willy Russell first wrote about them with an eager
and unpatronising vividness.
They are, after all, the direct descendents of Ibsen's Nora, slamming the door on their marriages and
walking out into the future to discover their real themselves. However, today's Shirley would
probably opt for a breast enlargement and Rita seek empowerment through pole-dancing rather than
Shakespeare.
Shirley's husband, Joe, and Rita's husband, Denny, are the same "stranger" that Tovald is to Nora.
Men are defined by their absence even when they are actually present:
Lynne Gardner, The Guardian, 12th April, 2010
Unfortunately, the film of "Shirley Valentine" takes a completely different approach by "opening up"
the story into a realistic drama of appalling banality. There were moments during the movie when I
cringed at the manipulative dialogue as the heroine recited warmed-over philosophy and inane oneliners when she should have been allowed to speak for herself.
The story involves one Shirley Valentine, British provincial housewife and lonely soul who spends a
great deal of time talking to her kitchen walls and other inanimate objects. She is meant to be plucky
and brave in her monologues, but since she often includes us in her solitude by talking directly to the
camera, I had trouble believing she was all that desperate. Shirley's husband is a kind but remote
figure; her marriage is cheerless; she feels life slipping from her grasp.
It is little wonder that a British actor, Conti, was hired to play the Greek waiter. No self-respecting
Greek actor would want this role, which is cobbled together out of every Hellenic Lover cliche of the
last several decades. He is poetic, gentle, tender and passionate, and he has a big black moustache,
and of course he is not faithful, but what the heck - she will never forget the love-drenched moments
they have spent together.
"Shirley Valentine" was directed by Lewis Milestone from a script byWilly Russell, based on Russell's
stage play, but they have not solved the problem of how to tell the story. Some scenes take place
while we watch them. Some take place while Shirley watches them along with us. Some consist of
Shirley talking directly to us, or to the wall or the sky or something. Most of the scenes fly straight in
the face of common sense, as when we are supposed to cheer because Shirley, jilted by her Greek
lover, finds happiness anyway as a waitress in his restaurant.
If there is a shred of plausibility in the film, it comes from Bernard Hill's performance as Shirley
Valentine's husband. He isn't a bad bloke, just a tired and indifferent one, and when he follows his
wife to Greece at the end of the film there are a few moments so truthful that they show up the
artifice of the rest.
Roger Ebert on the film version of Shirley Valentine, 15 th September 1989 (www.rogerebert.com)