Educating 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 was made he became Dr. Frank
Edwin Shirley illustrious Tour Manager and the two of them wrote the book on how to party on tour." Having built a successful trucking company, Shirley started a new company Edwin Shirley Staging which built stages for a number of large concerts including Live Aid in 1985. Shirley left both companies in the 1990s. While looking for rehearsal space in East London, Shirley viewed Three Mills Island, and realised the potential to develop a film studio there. After meeting with Peter Bazalgette, Shirley secured the site as the location for the first "Big Brother" reality TV programme, which went on to become