Frankly, Philip lacks heart

“Educating Rita”

Lowry, Salford

I might have suggested the time is ripe for a Willy Russell revival, since the man doesn’t seem to have had any sort of compulsion to write anything new for more than a decade.

But the fact is there isn’t an awful lot to revive.

“Blood Brothers” has been running since the Eighties, and “Educating Rita” and “Shirley Valentine” remain every artistic director’s friends: cheap to do and solid gold at the box office.

Which brings us to the Library Company’s first production of the new season, which proves the 1980 work to be as entertaining and surreptitiously clever as ever.

Russell charts Rita’s course from average hairdresser to university clone, and tutor Frank’s continued path from not-so-happy drunk to even-less-happy drunk. It’s all quite seamless and takes place in a sea of romcom-like one-liners and sexual tension that cleverly never takes the step into actual romance.

It’s an almost perfect two-hander, even if now its message of enlightenment for the sake of it would seem rather quaint.

To work at its best the play requires its performers to be evenly matched and I’m not sure that in Chris Honer’s production they are.

The evening has everything going for it looks-wise, from designer Judith Croft’s shabby, bookish rooms to its leading lady’s costume transition from working-class smart to middle-class shabby-chic, and Gillian Kearney herself is the perfect Rita: sparky, quick-witted and clearly better than everyone else around her thinks she is.

But as Frank, Philip Bretherton has all the words and strong comic timing, but little of the heart of Frank, the dissolute brainbox whose failure is mirrored in Rita’s rise. He seems just that little bit too clean-cut and businesslike to be spending most of his spare time in the pub.

That shouldn’t dissuade you from going to see it: the evening remains a delight. But come on, Mr Russell, stop living on your pile of “Blood Brothers” money and write something new.