Rita, Sue and Bob Too & A State Affair

10 April 2012

As the Government plans curfews for kids, Max Stafford-Clark's yoking together of this Bradford-set double-bill is a salutary reminder that the poor may always be with us, but the terms and conditions of their poverty have got worse.

Andrea Dunbar's play Rita, Sue And Bob Too presents an image of a rough but united Bradford community in 1982. The image of the same estate gleaned from interviews sewn together by Robin Soans in the second play, A State Affair, presents a more atomised picture of the same crime-riven community today. But do not fear a sermon from a sociological mount: there are plenty of laffs as well.

Dunbar's play remains as fresh as a stiff northerly wind off the Pennines. The story is bursting with a gutsy vitality it owes to the electric relationship between gobby teenagers Rita and Sue who engage in a torrid affair with randy handyman Bob in the back of his car. But however frisky, Dunbar's play has not acquired a nostalgic glow. There's little that's sentimental about the alcoholism, misogyny, deprivation and humping it encompasses.

Eighteen years later, after Mrs Thatcher and the miners' strike, the issues have changed. The characters in Soans's updated documentation of the community focus on questions of child abuse, homelessness and drug addiction in a landscape where even the CCTV cameras get stolen to pay for the next rock of crack. But for all the fear and despair this generates, the gritty northern spirit remains indomitable.

Max Stafford-Clark's company of seven deliver with wit and intensity. Outstanding are Emily Aston and Emma Rydal, tossing themselves with unblushing abandon into their roles as Rita and Sue in the first play and as pregnant junkies in the second. Matthew Wait is likewise an utterly charming rogue as Bob in Dunbar's play, before becoming an unnerving, quaking addict in Soans's follow-up. Like the rest of the cast they plumb a vital energy which is both entertaining and chastening.

Rita, Sue and Bob Too & A State Affair

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