It won multiple major awards for best actor and best actress and was nominated for three Academy Awards. The film stars Michael Caine, Julie Walters, Michael Williams and Maureen Lipman. Great fun.Īlthough Educating Rita comes to the end of its run at the Minack today, producer David Pugh is aiming to take the production on a 40th anniversary tour. Educating Rita is a 1983 British comedy-drama film directed by Lewis Gilbert with a screenplay by Willy Russell based on his 1980 stage play. Making no pretence at a fourth wall, the performers share everything directly with the happily involved spectators, only concealing, until the final scene, the secret of the uncanny resemblances between the twin-pair actors. Unknown to them – or to anyone else – the city is home to each of their long-lost, identical siblings, also master and servant and also called Antipholus and Dromio.
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And Clifton’s pared-down production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is shaped for an audience long deprived of conviviality by lockdown, a crowd-pleaser in the best sense of the term (miraculously, rehearsed over just four days).Īn eight-strong cast brings a boisterous energy to the series of increasingly frenetic situations of mistaken identity set off by the arrival in Ephesus of Antipholus and his servant, Dromio. The dreams of all three were realised because they connect with our aeons-old shared longing for the particular experience that is live performance – a magic merging of people, place and presentation. Chester’s Grosvenor Park theatre, which opened in 2010, is the dreamchild of Andrew Bentley and Alex Clifton and forerunner of the more permanent Storyhouse arts centre.
The Minack was built on the 1930s dream of Rowena Cade. Twins Lowri Izzard and Mari Izzard, Danielle Bird and Nichole Bird in The Comedy of Errors. This is, after all, a most appropriate setting. Before us, two people are making choices that limit or expand their horizons. Taking a tight grip on her coat, Johnson guides it along the air current and loops it firmly on to a hook, her gesture emphasising Rita’s determination not to be dictated to by circumstances, to take charge of her life.Ī gull swoops over the stage just as Rita is telling Frank that Chekhov’s The Seagull is a “dead sad” play. Tompkinson uses the wind’s buffetings to intensify our impression that Frank is flailing desperately to take control of his job, his love life and his drinking that, as a poet, he is trapped under the weight of his own defeated expectations.
Stephen Tompkinson and Jessica Johnson respond deftly to such unpredictabilities, cleverly adapting them to their characterisations. Rita blows in, makes to take off her coat: a gust almost rips it from her back. Frantically fluttering papers threaten to fly from his desk he grabs at glass weights to hold them down. Enter Frank: long, wispy hair, lashing across his face, hinders his search for the whisky bottle hidden on his bookshelves.
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