Educating Rita Lashana Lynch as Frank and Rita. Educating Rita Educating Rita is a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell. It is a play for two actors set entirely in the office of an Open University lecturer. Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, "Educating Rita" premièred at The Warehouse, London, in June 1980 starring Julie Walters and Mark Kingston. The play was directed by Mike Ockrent. The plays follows the relationship between a 26-year-old Liverpudlian working class hairdresser and Frank, a middle-aged university lecturer, during the course of a year. In the play Frank has no surname, but when the film
Blood Knot Blood Knot Blood Knot is an early play by South African playwright, actor, and director Athol Fugard. Its single-performance premier was in 1961 in Johannesburg, South Africa, with the playwright and Zakes Mokae playing the brothers Morris and Zachariah. Lucille Lortel produced "The Blood Knot", starring J.D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zachariah, at the Cricket Theatre, Off Broadway, in New York City, in 1964, "launch[ing]" Fugard's "American career." It was the first South African play performed with an interracial cast. Its Broadway premiere was at the John Golden Theatre, in 1986, with Fugard and Mokae playing