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rob kinsman talks to willy russell

“One afternoon she just exploded onto the page. I didn’t know who she was.”

This, explains Willy Russell, was the birth of one of his most famous creations – the title character in Educating Rita.

Russell had been commissioned by the RSC to write a play for the Warehouse theatre (now better known as the Donmar Warehouse) in 1979. He had accepted the commission, but had no idea what he was actually going to write.

“When I looked at the theatre all I knew was that I wanted to put something human and warm into what was rather an austere space. But that was just a notion and notions aren’t plays.”

The breakthrough came while working in his wife’s parent’s home. His father-in-law was a librarian, and had filled his own home with books. As Russell sat working in a book-lined study, the room gradually began asserting itself into his writing, becoming the template for Frank’s study. The day the characters arrived he trusted his instincts and allowed their words to pour out onto the page. The first fourteen pages of the final script remain a fairly close approximation of what he wrote that day. And, as was soon noticed once the play was performed, there were a number of similarities between the play’s title character and Russell’s own life: both had returned to education later in life, and both had been working as a women’s hairdresser.

“There was no conscious attempt to sit and sculpt out an autobiographical play. I mean, I loot my past, as anyone does. The reason Rita’s a hairdresser is that I could sketch her outside life with some authority; without having to conduct research – the greatest excuse for not writing ever.”

The play’s exploration of the pitfalls of returning to education is less superficial however, and was shaped by Russell’s own problematic experience of trying to make up for the education he missed at school.

Educating Willy

Willy Russell’s experience of school had been based more around surviving than learning. When he left, aged 15, he had one O-level and few prospects. His mother encouraged him to enrol for a short course in cutting and styling, and he promptly fell into a career as a women’s hairdresser.

It was while running his own business that he started to discover his flair for writing. It started with songs, sketches and poetry, written in the back-room of the hair-salon when business was slack. This fragmented way of writing wasn’t conducive to creating great works of art, but it did teach him that his imagination was a powerful place to escape to.

When he was 20, Willy Russell signed up for an evening class in English Literature. It opened the doors on a whole new world of literature, of the

richness and possibility of the written text. But the sixties were not a time when it was acceptable for working-class people to go back to education later in life – being no longer a teenager, most schools deemed Russell to be too old to return to his studies full time.

Finally, fate led him to Childwell Hall County College, where an hour of impassioned pleas to the deputy head led to Russell’s admission to study a package of O-levels. Combining intense studies with work to finance his course, he finally emerged with enough qualifications to give him a chance of pursuing avenues that would have been a mere pipe-dream a year earlier.

Ironically, Willy Russell soon ended up a teacher in a school full of unruly children much like those he had grown up with. Every week he was given a class that even the most experienced teachers at the school refused to teach for more than half-an-hour a week. Finding himself unable to shout over the noise of the class, he went in one week and started quietly inventing a story that he told to the pupils at the front of the room. Gradually the rest of the class fell silent, and for the next few weeks they listened carefully to Russell’s impromptu storytelling.

Willy Russell clearly had imagination and a flair for gripping stories, but he needed focus. While teaching he met the woman who would later become his wife, and she prompted a more serious interest in writing and going to the theatre. A production of John McGrath’s Unruly Elements at the Liverpool Everyman in 1971 sparked a serious interest in writing for the stage, something he set about with typical determination. A string of commissions followed, ultimately leading to Russell writing a string of modern classics including Our Day Out, Shirley Valentine and Blood Brothers.

Plays for women

Educating Rita became a world-wide hit, and spawned an acclaimed film version starring Michael Caine and Julie Walters. Together with his one-woman monologue, Shirley Valentine, it has established Willy Russell as an exceptionally skilful writer of complex female characters. Although he claims that many other male writers, from Ayckbourn to Shakespeare, have also created memorable female parts, he acknowledges that his celebrated title characters were somewhat unusual when they were written.

“Until then, there were not many theatre plays where a working-class woman was given the whole scope of the stage and a full emotional journey. It was because they were a different kind of woman to those we were used to seeing onstage.”

As for how a man can write about women so convincingly, Russell doesn’t claim any magic formula, simply skill and intuition.

“I’m as happy writing about a teenage boy from Manchester [in his novel The Wrong Boy] as I am with the female parts. You just have to dare to know about whoever you’re writing about.”

Keeping up with the times

The version of Educating Rita being performed in Hornchurch in 2004 is a version that Willy Russell revised in 2002. But can a play about a specific challenge in a specific society still be relevant over twenty years later?

“In many ways the world is very different. In terms of the external gloss, the class system is a very different class system to when the play was written,” explains Russell. “When I wrote it there was a large, identifiable working class in Britain, and within that working class were lots of strata. What we have now instead, is an underclass.”

The education system is, in many ways, more accessible these days. Access courses and return-to-work schemes are designed specifically to combat many of the problems that existed in 80s Britain. Also, there is no longer the same prejudice against women returning to education.

“Because of that, I felt that the play may have dated. When I came to re-work it, I cut out some of the details – the gags that meant something in 1979. But once we cut those things out and played the play, what I saw is that it can’t date because it’s based on the universal fact of somebody trying to make their life better.”

The future

Willy Russell’s plays continue to be produced all around the globe. His first novel, The Wrong Boy, was published in 2000 and has now been translated into over 15 languages.

He has also returned to his song-writing roots and created an album, Hoovering the Moon, which will be released later this year. As singer and guitarist he’ll be touring the album with fellow writer-musician Tim Firth during 2004. None of which is getting in the way of his dramatic writing, and he is currently working on a film script.

Perhaps more than anything, Willy Russell’s own life demonstrates the talent that could have been wasted if he hadn’t had the opportunity to resume his education. With many strings to his bow and a body of work that has been enjoyed by millions of people, there can be no better testament to the power and necessity of education.

www.willyrussell.com

© The Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch 2004