Alan Durband pounds by means of innovative seven-year tax-free covenants for the conversion of the building. It was a popular theatre specialising in local Liverpool settings & political subjects which gave opportunities to new playwrights – most famous of whom is probably Willy Russell (to whom Durband lent his Welsh cottage to write 'Educating Rita') and to actors such as: Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Jonathan Pryce & Julie Walters who joined the Theatre company around 1975. To mark this era, Willy Russell unveiled a plaque in memory of Alan Durband at the theatre in 1998 in the company of actor Pete Postlethwaite
Educating Eve Educating Eve Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate is a book by Geoffrey Sampson, providing arguments against Noam Chomsky's theory of a human instinct for (first) language acquisition. Sampson explains the original title of the book as a deliberate allusion to "Educating Rita" (1980), and uses the plot of that play to illustrate his argument. Sampson's book is a response to Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" specifically and Chomskyan linguistic nativism broadly. The title, "Educating Eve", was dropped after the first edition because the allusion to "Educating Rita" "was deemed unduly mysterious". The revised edition (2005) contains an additional chapter