Rita, Sue and Bob Too
A State Affair
Reviews / Articles
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Rita, Sue and Bob Too A State Affair Reviews / Articles |
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Rita,
Sue and Bob Too / Soho Theatre Two plays. Same setting. Different times. In 1980, Andrea Dunbar wrote 'The Arbour' for the Royal Court's Young Writer's Festiva land from then on struggled to cope with writing plays, and being a single mum living on the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford. In 1982, came 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too', later well known for the feeble film. A few years later she was dead at the age of 29. What she described - with some ebullience - was a place where girls could all too easily find themselves pregnant before they were 20, either saddled with drunken, brutal, unfaithful husbands, or in poverty on their own. The two teenage babysitters who have it off with a married man in glorious discomfort in his motor are no shrinking violets, especially as played by Emily Aston and Emma Rydal, but it's clear that they are the ones who will carry the can. |
Who
knows what Dunbar would make of her estate if she were alive today? But
for the devastating second half of a double bill that should be compulsory
viewing, Out of Joint has gone back to Bradford and talked to the people
who live on the same estate today. From that material, Robin Soans has
written an account that hovers somewhere between a documentary and a play.
The bleak fact is that between 1982 and now, drugs have taken a hold.
The actors build up a portrait of lives turned criminal by their need
to raise money to feed an expensive habit. Impressively, under Max Stafford-Clark's
direction, the tone of the piece is neither hectoring nor self-righteous
but rather concentrates on those insiders who are trying to make a difference
as much as on those who have given up. Unlike the newspaper coverage of
Damilola's death, Out of Joint doesn't wallow voyeuristically in the gory
details of life on a rundown estate but rather makes us engage with the
huge problems that can never easily be solved. It's heartbreaking to see. Jane Edwardes |
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Rita,
Sue and Bob Too / Everyman, Liverpool Another brilliantly assembled double bill. The late Andrea Dunbar's play of northern working-class life, hard times, sad sex, broken families, less and less work (1982) has lost none of it's edge. The writing is tough, simple and full of unsentimental compassion: Dunbar knew what she was talking about. Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint company pairs it with Robin Soan's play, edited from conversations he and the company had on a Bradford estate. The same seven actors bring several of the resulting stories to shocking life. Here is urban England sliding into the 21st century: child abuse, single-parent families, alcoholism, unemployment, crime, drug abuse, underfunded charities struggling to help. One thing this calm, unhysterical play shows is how accurate Dunbar's writing was. The other is a sense of despair and endurance. Who cares? I'd like all surviving members of the Thatcher, Major and Blair cabinets to see this searing double bill. Some chance. John Peter |
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Rita,
Sue and Bob Too / Soho Theatre,
W1 This
provocative double bill from Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint company
offers then and now perspectives on life on the Buttershaw estate, one
of Bradford's deprived housing schemes. It sounds like an evening of
grim-up-north polemic but turns out to be vibrant, thoughtful and surprisingly
entertaining drama. |
lives
riven by poverty, crime and drugs. Dunbar's play, one of three she wrote before sadly dying of a brain haemorrhage at 29, is a brash, ribald, grimly amusing comedy about the torrid, backseat-of-the-car affair between a randy builder, Bob, and his two 15-year-old babysitters, Rita and Sue. The girls' unapologetic tartiness stems from the family strife, alcoholism, no-money boredom and desperation that surrounds them, but Dunbar's writing is never judgmental and sentimental - she simply wrote about what she knew. A State Affair brings us up to date with life in Buttershaw, which makes Rita, Sue almost nostalgically golden. The testimonies of drug addicts, thieves, single mums and beleagured but resilient community workers are transformed into interweaving monologues that show a community in which even the security cameras are stolen to fund the next drug fix. But through it all, |
one
senses a determined spirit to survive. Stafford-Clark's cast of seven animate both plays with verve, commitment and grim humour in roles that add to the compare-and-contrast element of this double bill. Among excellent performances, Emily Aston and Emma Rydal are outstanding as the unrepentant, gabby Rita and Sue in Dunbar's play and as pregnant teenagers battered by drugs and child abuse in Soan's chilling follow-up. Equally impressive is Matthew Wait as a roguish Bob in the evening's first half, and an unnervingly twitchy addict in the second. The artfully theatrical way in which A State Affair's documentary material is presented produces some over-actorly moments, and Rita, Sue has early-work flaws (plot developments are clunkily introduced and scenes crudely terminated). But both make a considerable impact and bear the stamp of harsh, chastening truth. |
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RITA, SUE AND BOB TOO / A STATE AFFAIR - Lyn Gardner Theatre becomes urgent, relevant and absolutely crucial in this double bill of plays. Both are set on Bradford's Buttershaw estate, one of Britain's deprived housing schemes, wracked over the past 40 years by unemployment, poverty and cheap heroin. In Buttershaw you find what right-wing sociologist Charles Murray calls "the underclass", in reality, struggling single mums trying to bring up their kids decently on no money, no hope and in the absence of men who have become redundant in every sense. As Mum says in Rita, Sue and Bob Too, written in 1982 by the then 21-year-old Andrea Dunbar: "Anyway, all men are no good. They want shooting for all the trouble they cause." There was something prophetic in those words. Rita, Sue and Bob Too was the second of three plays that Dunbar wrote before a fatal brain haemorrhage at 29. This grim little comedy about two 15-year-old girls' affair with the same married man, was one from the heart. She only wrote about what she knew. Max Stafford-Clark, then Director of the Royal Court, commissioned the play and now revives it and pairs it with a new work, A State Affair by Robin Soans. Soans's play is a piece of verbatim theatre created via interviews with people who live in Buttershaw today. |
If, for all its mouthy, larky, high spirits, Rita Sue and Bob Too has a hard-boiled desperate edge, A State Affair is like falling down a deep, dark well. It depicts a war zone where the front line consists of people struggling with understated heroism to hold their lives together and deal with the consequences of addiction, child abuse, domestic violence and lack of hope. On its own, either play would have impact. Together, they cannot be ignored. One springs from the other. That was then and this is now. A State Affair ends poignantly with Dunbar's own daughter, Lorraine, a former drug addict, being given voice: "If my mum wrote the play now, Rita and Sue would be smackheads on crack as well…and working the red light districts, sleeping with everybody and anybody for money." Max Stafford-Clark's production is matter of fact, unobtrusive and best of all, honest. So are the performances. It never lets you forget that, in reality, there are people on the Buttershaw estate who are living this piece of theatre every day. |
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Ribald bad sex gives way to harrowing reality Eighteen years ago, Andrea Dunbar, a young woman from a Bradford council estate, wrote a play for the Royal Court - a ribald, warts'n'all account of local life, centred on a randy builder's rampant affair with a couple of schoolgirls. Rita, Sue and Bob Too caused a sensation, not least because of its opening scene, in which Bob drops his trousers and has it off with both teenagers on the back seat of his car. Max Stafford-Clark, who commissioned the play, now brilliantly revisits it with his company Out of Joint. The frantic bad sex makes for as painfully funny viewing as ever, but the primary purpose of the revival isn't to remind us of Dunbar's explicitness, or her natural dramatic talent, although it does both. Stafford-Clark's main concern is to show how dated the play has become. A State Affair, which rounds off the evening, reflects life on the Buttershaw Estate today. It's hard to imagine a work that could make the violent, unhappy world of Rita, Sue look like an enchanted kingdom, but this does. |
Dunbar died in 1990 of a brain haemorrhage, at the age of 29. In her place, writer Robin Soans has transformed the testaments that Buttershaw residents gave Out of Joint actors into a harrowing sequel. Two decades on, and the sense of a community splitting apart is far more tangible. In contrast to the conventionally organised structure of Dunbar's play, Soans arrange a cacophony of voices: drug addicts, thieves and the do-gooders struggling to stop the rot. In among them are a pair of pregnant teenagers, Tina and Marie, from homes too broken to be repaired. A magnificent cast takes parallel parts in both plays. Emily Aston and Emma Rydal show Rita and Sue at their ballsy best, full of bickering vitality as they hanker after Matthew Wait's priapic Bob. Later, they exchange school skirts for baggy trousers and pumps; worn down by drug and child abuse, Tina and Marie suddenly look prematurely decrepit. In a neat reversal, Sue's brawling parents (Ian Redford and Jane Wood, both superb) become the busybody crusaders in A State Affair, a stroke that typifies the production's welcome sense of its own theatricality. This is, transparently, acting - not real life. In Bradford, there are no comfortable seats from which to view the mess. Es Devlin's clever, trompe-l'oeil set provides a twin perspective on to a patch of green: it could be the view from the top of a tower block or a glimpse of light at the end of a tunnel. There is a glimmer of hope, but all too easily, this provocative double-bill suggests, that could just be an illusion. |
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Rita, Sue and Bob (again) too Max
Stafford-Clark delights in presenting challenging theatrical double bills.
His latest pairing, sourced at Bradford's Buttershaw estate, is no exception. 'Somehow, a notepad and pencil are not threatening,' the actor-playwright Robin Soans declares as I deposit my bulky Executive Walkman and penile, wire-trailing microphone at the centre of the hotel table where he and the director Max Stafford-Clark are finishing their breakfast. But my lamentable techno dependency has this excuse: that I am here to talk to two experienced interviewees, whereas Soans and Stafford-Clark have just assembled a 'verbatim play' from people who are routinely denied a voice and so need to be put at their ease before they'll talk about themselves. Hence the advocacy of the less invasive scribble-pad. Performed with a splendidly unobtrusive skill by a cast of seven, A State Affair is a powerful collage of direct-to-audience testimonies from the inhabitants of the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford. The voices belong to the drug addicts and the run-ragged careworkers, the sexually abused and the parentally abandoned folk who form the population of an area where it takes some spirit to rise above the prevailing misery and rock-bottom expectations. The piece is also a fine example of a commissioning policy that Stafford-Clark has long deployed fruitfully. During his time as head of London's Royal Court theatre (1979-92), and as the founding father of the touring company Out of Joint, this director has delighted in persuading contemporary dramatists to compose plays that respond to a pre-existing work. It's a strategy that has produced some thought-provoking pairings. For example, The Recruiting Officer, Farquhar's early-18th-century take on the choppy overlap between military and civilian life was played in arresting rep with Our Country's Good, Timberlake Wertenbaker's inspired adaptation of a Thomas Keneally novel about the inmates of an Australian penal settlement who mounted a production of Farquhar's play. Sometimes, the thinking behind these dramatic diptychs is pragmatic, since regional venues are more likely to take new work if it comes in on the back of a classic. And there have been failures (the experience of Wertenbaker's Break of Day suggests that you should never try to complement, still less compete with Chekhov in the end-of-a-century blues department). But in general (as with Stephen Jeffrey's play The Libertine, which painted a bracing, hindsight-enriched portrait of the rake Rochester, who was the model for the decadent Restoration hero The Man of Mode), the cross-currents generated between modernity and the past have been vigorous and illuminating. This current venture is a departure in two respects. A State Affair is the second piece in a double bill that opens with the 1982 play that first drew the Royal Court's attention to the Buttershaw estate. Rita, Sue and Bob Too is a blackly hilarious account of underage sex and pregnancy as two schoolgirl babysitters are initiated into the comforts and (in every sense) the drawbacks of coitus on the drives back home with the eponymous Bob. It was written with a wonderfully undeceived directness and pre-feminist stoicism by Andrea Dunbar, a young Buttershaw resident who died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 29, leaving behind three children by three different men and debts to the DHSS that it would have taken her more than 34 years to have paid off. |
The bouncier film version, which Dunbar disliked, has dislodged the play in people's perceptions. With its saucy implication that the sexual threesome will go on and on, the movie has become, says Soans, 'a sort of stag-night, Full Monty-style outing'. In Liverpool, where the Out of Joint tour started, some of the audience came to the double-bill expecting 'Carry On Up the Council Estate followed by Oops, There Goes My Hypodermic!' Directed with fluency, humour and bite by Stafford-Clark, what they get is more challenging: a shift from a folkloric working class, which in 1982 still retained some of the vestiges a community, to a heroin-ravaged underclass left without the prospect of work and then 'red-lined' as humanly irrelevant by the forces of global capitalism. Ideally, Stafford-Clark would have liked to present a 'Rise and Fall of the Working Class' trilogy. The opener would have been DH Lawrence's 1912 play The Daughter-in-Law with, on the one hand, its analogous situation of family reactions to a young girl's illegitimate pregnancy and, on the other, with its presupposition of those supporting structures (chapel, union, family, employment) that have now withered away. If the current double bill differs from usual Out of Joint pairings in being a truncated trilogy, it also yokes the single artistic vision of Dunbar's play to a piece of humane research conducted collectively by middle-class outsiders. What is heartening about A State Affair is its sensitive and witty avoidance of the pitfalls of this approach. As one character says, 'The thing you have to remember is, it's someone's life'. Soans makes a point of never forgetting this. These people are not specimens, but individuals who step out of their exemplary outlines in unexpected ways. Nor does the piece fall sentimentally in love with the hard-pressed careworkers. For example, traces of homophobia and racism become apparent in the (in some ways) inspirational figure of Sue, a born-again Christian who tirelessly runs Agape House, and independent care centre for addicts established on a bank loan. The piece is adroitly structured so that there is a divergence at the end between those estate dwellers who are readying themselves for a second chance at life, should it come (Buttershaw received, in 1994, a portion of a £31m regeneration budget) and those who are not. Ironically, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, which generously hosted the Company's research work, programmed a revival of Rita, Sue and Bob Too last year and so cannot take the double bill. This means that, to play the piece to the people from the estate (in two performances in January at the Alhambra Studio, Bradford), Out of Joint will be out of pocket. Meanwhile, Stafford-Clark is working on another diptych with the dramatist April De Angelis. This time the classic will be Goldsmith's 18th-century comedy She Stoops to Conquer, and the modern play will take off from the fact that Garrick, the greatest actor of the era, turned down the plum role in the piece "because Tony Lumpkin was not a straightforward hero - he even suggested that the name be changed". So the affair becomes a parable of "how, when as an artist you begin to pander to taste, you get into trouble". And if past form is anything to go by, it will be a further indication of the principle that: one play is company; two are an invigorating dialectic. |
(26th October
2000)
(26th October
2000)
(6th December
2000)