When Adelle Stripe and Kate Wasserberg talk about
Andrea Dunbar, they do so in the first person, as if they were mates. This is
the case even though neither of them ever met the writer of Rita, Sue and Bob
Too, Dunbar’s celebrated tragi-comic frontline snapshot of survival strategies
in 1980s Thatcher’s Britain. Such empathy speaks volumes about the lingering power
of Dunbar’s writing before she tragically died in 1990 aged just 29.
Stripe’s forensic fan-girl turned academic dedication
to Dunbar resulted in Black Teeth and A Brilliant Smile, a brilliant
fictionalised account of Dunbar’s short but turbulent life on the broken-down
Bradford estate where she lived and died. Wasserberg, meanwhile, has directed
the current revival of Rita, Sue and Bob Too which arrives in Glasgow tonight
as part of a tour co-produced by Out of Joint theatre company with the Royal
Court Theatre in London and Bolton Octagon.
Both Stripe and Wasserberg took part in a recent event
at the Royal Court Theatre alongside film maker Clio Barnard, director of The
Arbor, an impressionistic documentary about Dunbar. For both the show and the
event to take place on the same stage where Rita, Sue and Bob Too first burst
into messy life three and a half decades previously was a symbolic show of
strength on several counts.
“Just being onstage at the Royal Court was really
strange,” says Stripe. “It was the first time I’d seen the play, and after four
years doing the book, I really wanted to see Andrea’s work done how it should
be done to mark what for me had been quite a long journey.”
For Wasserberg too, it was an emotional occasion.
“It was really amazing,” she says. “After all the uncertainty
around everything that had happened, as soon as you put the play on that stage,
it became about Andrea, and about taking her play home.”
The uncertainty Wasserberg mentions is in part to do
with the decision by Royal Court artistic director Vicky Featherstone to cancel
the show’s scheduled dates at the theatre that launched Dunbar, before
reinstating them two days later. The first decision came on the back of No Grey
Area, a Royal Court hosted event in which victims of abuses of power in the
theatre industry were given voice to tell their stories. This was prompted in
part by the similarly inclined #MeToo campaign, which in turn was a result of
recent allegations of inappropriate behaviour against several high profile names
in the arts and entertainment industry.
It had also come to light that Out of Joint co-founder
and then artistic director Max Stafford-Clark had been asked to stand down from
his post earlier in the year following allegations against him. Stafford-Clark had
commissioned and directed the original production of Rita, Sue and Bob Too
during his tenure running the Royal Court. He had already overseen Dunbar’s
first play, The Arbor, written when she was fifteen. Without Stafford-Clark as
her champion, Rita, Sue and Bob Too’s unflinching and desperately funny depiction
of a pair of potty-mouthed teenage baby-sitters who are effectively groomed by
the local lothario they work for might arguably have never seen the light of
day.
Dunbar’s characters remain best known to many from
Alan Clarke’s 1987 film, released five years after the play first caused a
sensation at the Royal Court. Fifteen years after Out of Joint last toured the
play, Dunbar’s more discomforting original may now be a period piece, but it
remains alive with a rawness rarely seen on a British stage.
“The film’s funny, but the play is more cutting,” says
Stripe. It’s about the strength of the friendship between these two girls in
the way that all of Andrea’s work was about friendship, so when you see t
performed onstage there’s a real poignancy to it.”
For Wasserberg too, “It’s a love affair between Rita
and Sue. The friends you have when you’re 15 or 16, they form part of who you
are, and you carry them with you. That’s what the play’s about, the last days
of that, and Andrea captured these people on the edge of childhood brilliantly.
They’re playing at being women, but they’re still kids, and occasionally you
see the mask slip. They’re really good at pretending to be grown-ups, but they’re
not. Teenagers always say they’re grown-ups, but it’s our job to know they’re
not. That’s Bob’s crime, because he doesn’t do that.
“It’s like what happened in Rotherham when all those
young girls were groomed. The right wing press said that because they were
poor, they smoke and they swear, that somehow they’re grown up, but they’re
not. The play is so much more brutal than the film. What Andrea wrote was much
more complex, and acknowledged the subtleties of it and the societal boredom
that fed into it.”
Given Dunbar’s background of poverty, domestic abuse
and life on the breadline at a time when Margaret Thatcher was claiming there
was no such thing as society, that she managed to produce three plays in her
lifetime at all was a remarkable achievement. As the class divide has widened
and working class voices become increasingly marginalised, the need to unearth
talents such as Dunbar has become increasingly vital.
“Andrea is the absolute guiding principal of Out of
Joint’s commitment to developing new writers,” says Wasserberg. “It’s about trying
to reach writers who wouldn’t normally be exposed to the opportunity to have a
play put on, and trying to find out what barriers there are for working class
writers.”
Stripe goes further.
“In 2018, people are still saying where are these voices,”
she says. “We were asked at the Royal Court event where the equivalent of Andrea
is now, but I’m not even sure if someone who’s around now from the same
background as her would even be writing drama. I think she’d be arguing on
Facebook, filming stuff on her phone and loading it onto YouTube.”
Both Stripe and Wasserberg agree that Dunbar was a
major talent.
“When Andrea died, we were absolutely robbed of an amazing
voice,” says Wasserberg. “If she was around now I think she’d be writing across
other forms as well as theatre, and I think she’d be one of our leading lights.
What amazes me about Andrea’s writing is the craft. You can see the expert
structuring there. Maybe some of her writing was instinctive, but there’s a tendency
with working class female writers in particular to say, oh it just poured out
of them, and that’s really patronising. The Daily Mail called Andrea a genius
from the slums, but you never see them writing about a genius from the suburbs.
“There was real intellect and talent with Andrea, and
it feels like that play’s been built like a machine. She was only 19, so of
course some of it’s raw, but bloody hell, if she was around now she’d be a
major writer.”
Despite the recent off-stage dramas surrounding Out of
Joint’s production, at the heart of Rita, Sue and Bob Too is a form of
liberation.
“It is a period piece,” says Stripe, “but Andrea shows
us these young women who aren’t victims, even though Bob’s been grooming them.
They’re not virgins, but he’s a loser. The girls have got nothing, and this
attention from this older man gives them a reason to be alive, even though for
them it’s just a cheap thrill.
“In these post-Savile times you think, hang on, that’s
a bit dodgy, but this happened to Andrea. She had no political agenda. She just
wrote what she saw and didn’t worry about the consequences. If she was around
now looking back she might have something to say about it, but she was a
teenager, and she wrote this amazing thing that’s become part of our cultural
DNA, and that’s not going to go away.”
Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow,
February 13-17.
The Herald, February 13th 2018
ends
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