Educating Rita: Act Two, Scene Seven Summary & Analysis

Wrapped in a winter coat, Rita enters Frank’s empty office and places a Christmas card on a filing cabinet, where many others are displayed. Frank then comes through the door carrying two heavy cases, and Rita jumps to help him. “Merry Christmas, Frank. Have they sacked y’?” she asks. “Not quite,” he says, explaining that he has to go to Australia for two years as a punishment for a particularly drunken night. Julia isn’t going to accompany him. He jokes that he’ll fit right in when he goes to Australia, claiming that the country is a drinker’s “paradise.” Changing the subject, Rita thanks him for signing her up for her exams. She tells him that when she flipped the exam over, the first question read, “Suggest ways in which one might cope with some of the staging difficulties in a production of Peer Gynt.”

Rita explains that at first, she could only stare at the question on her exam and think about what Frank had once said about it. “You think you gave me nothing, did nothing for me,” she says. “You think I just ended up with a load of quotes an’ empty phrases; an’ I did. But that wasn’t your doin’. I was so hungry. I wanted it all so much that I didn’t want it to be questioned.” She then tells Frank that she recently came home to find that Trish, who is so educated and proper, had tried to kill herself.

Frank asks Rita if she answered the Peer Gynt question by writing, “Do it on the radio,” and she says that she could have done this, but she didn’t. “You’d have been proud of me if I’d done that,” she says. Instead, she answered the exam questions in the standard, academic way, and she earned high marks, too. “It might be worthless in the end,” she admits. “But I had a choice. I chose, me. Because of what you’d given me. I had a choice. I wanted to come back an’ tell y’ that. That y’ a good teacher.” Flattered, Frank asks Rita to come with him to Australia, but she politely declines, explaining that Tiger—who she now recognizes is “a bit of a wanker”—wants her to come to France, and her mother wants her to come home for Christmas.

“Whatever you do,” Frank says, “you might as well take this. It’s erm—well, it’s er—it’ a dress really. I bought it some time ago—for erm—for an educated friend—of mine…” Unwrapping the gift, Rita looks at the dress and asks, “This is what you call a scholarly neckline?” Frank admits that when he was choosing it, he put “more emphasis on the word woman than the word educated.” Thankful for this gesture, Rita laments that she only ever “take[s]” from Frank but never gives him anything in return. Because of this, she tells him to sit down, finds a pair of scissors, and says, “I’m gonna take ten years off you…”