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
Andrea Dunbar Andrea Dunbar Andrea Dunbar (22 May 1961 – 20 December 1990) was a British playwright. She wrote "The Arbor" (1980) and "Rita, Sue and Bob Too" (1982), an autobiographical drama about the sexual adventures of teenage girls living in a run-down part of Bradford, West Yorkshire. She wrote most of the adaptation for the film "Rita, Sue and Bob Too" (1987). The "Mail on Sunday" described Dunbar as "a genius straight from the slums". Dunbar grew up on Brafferton Arbor on the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford with seven brothers and sisters. Both her parents had worked in the textile