IT IS only Tuesday
teatime in Newcastle city centre, but, already, carefully demarcated packs of
jacketless lads and lasses in hanky-size skirts are on the prowl, in search of
that ever-elusive good time. This is the heart of Viz-country, where the cruel
but hilarious parodies of home-grown low-life -The Fat Slags, Sid The Sexist,
et al - seem to have stumbled straight off the page of the comic. Such
economically-challenged grotesques have acquired a near-Dickensian immortality,
destined to repeat their tragic adventures in nowhereland ad nauseum.
Across town, on
stage at Newcastle Playhouse, a group of actors are going through the workaday
motions of the final technical rehearsal before opening night. The characters
talk of doing smack, of violent sexual abuse as an everyday occurrence, and of
lives over-lapping in the most brutal of landscapes. It sounds neither
sensationalist nor exploitative, but ugly, matter-of-fact, and how it is.
Of course, the
lines are not of the actors' devising. But nor, strictly speaking, do they
belong to playwright Robin Soans either. Because the words of A State Affair
are taken, verbatim, from conversations two years ago with residents of
Bradford's run-down Buttershaw estate.
There, just like in Viz-land, domestic, drug, and alcohol abuse are rampant, as
are crime, promiscuity, and teenage pregnancy. But, while Buttershaw may be
occupied by characters, they're by no means cartoons.
Just look at Rita,
Sue and Bob Too. No, not Alan Clark's mid-eighties movie of Andrea Dunbar's
play about sexual trysts between two schoolgirls and their wideboy employer.
There, it came complete with the next best thing to a happy ending and Black
Lace singing We're Having A Gang-Bang. This Rita, Sue And Bob Too premiered at
the Royal Court in 1982, when estates like Buttershaw were being wiped off the
map of Thatcher's Britain in the then prime minister's first destructive
flourish.
''I don't think
Andrea liked the film very much,'' says Max Stafford-Clark in diplomatic
understatement. Stafford-Clark is director of both the original production and
the touring revival that arrives in Edinburgh tonight. He recognises, however,
that the movie is probably what has given the play its long life, by packing in
audiences who are expecting a cheeky northern bedroom romp, only to be kicked
in the teeth. And, if A State Affair continues the assault, so much the better.
''In London, it's
seen as part of a social debate,'' says Stafford-Clark, ''but in the north it's
perceived as popular drama and, on that level, doesn't quite deliver because it
gets grimmer and grimmer as it goes along. In Leeds, about a third of the
audience were first-time theatregoers, which, while the actors had a great
time, created its own set
of problems because people were going in and out for drinks. At one point
someone shouted out, 'Give her one'. ''
Rita, Sue and Bob
Too was Dunbar's second play. Her first, The Arbor, set, as always, in
Buttershaw, somewhat circuitously found its way into a Royal Court young
writers' festival, where Stafford-Clark was struck by the play's vigour and
candour.
''Andrea never
thought she'd write another play,'' Stafford-Clark recalls. ''It was only when
she realised she'd get paid that she got down to it. So you'd suggest a scene
and she'd write it, but if you suggested something from the mother's
perspective, she'd say she couldn't do it because she had not heard it. But at
the end of the play there's this pre-feminist feminist moment. The great thing
about this play is that the girls are never victims.''
Stafford-Clark has
spent his working life discovering writers like this, ever since he ran
Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in its old Grassmarket garret in the early
seventies. Later he founded Joint Stock on fashionable collectivist grounds
before a lengthy stint at the Royal Court, which he only left in 1993 to build
from scratch the less ideologically simplistic Out of Joint, which coincided
with a new wave of writers more in accord with the company name's splintered
implications.
Stafford-Clark
could afford to sit out the recent round of musical chairs in London, with
artistic directorships up for grabs at the National, the Almeida, and
Hampstead. He says he has no desire to run a theatre building now, though he
did apply for the job at the National, ''just to be part of the debate, I suppose.
I was never a front-runner and I certainly didn't expect to get it''.
Such seeming
abstractions are of little consequence to most outside London's theatrical
enclave, where sensation-seeking hedonism between consenting adults is a way of
life. It certainly had little effect on Dunbar, who, rather than jump ship like
umpteen working class heroes before her, stayed in Buttershaw, where she drank,
fought with the neighbours, was beaten up by boyfriends, and had three
children, all to separate fathers. Stafford-Clark likens writing to boxing, in
that both pursuits enable an escape from the mean streets of working-class
life. ''Andrea had no desire to escape,'' he says.
Getting by was a
full-time job, made even harder by success. A third play, Shirley, followed,
but by the time she was 29, Andrea Dunbar was dead after suffering a brain
haemorrhage.
One of the people
Stafford-Clark spoke to for A State Affair was Dunbar's daughter, Lorraine, a
heroin addict and, in an all too familiar case of history repeating itself, a
single mother. ''She can't stand her mother. Andrea used to go to the pub and
take the handle off the bedroom door so the kids couldn't get out. So, while
she wrote about brutality with great skill, she was also brutalised by that
world.''
By 7pm the
Playhouse bar is filling up. Student types and would-be starlets mix and match,
the usual pre-show punters for a theatre next to a university. Except, in the
corner, hard-nosed and hawk-eyed, stand a few teenage girls whose street smart
dressed-upness suggests they've not darkened these doors before. Chewing gum,
sticking to their own, they scan the bar with invisible antennae. Just let
anyone dare.
Outside, more of
them hang about, sharing one last tab before they brave indoors. One girl sits
apart on a bench, scowling in between smoke-rings, an invisible wall between
her, the cold and the rest of the world. In Viz-land, Buttershaw, and a million
places like it, the night is still young - and getting younger by the minute.
The double bill of
Rita, Sue and Bob Too and A State Affair is at the Traverse, Edinburgh, to
Saturday.
The Herald, February 7th 2002
ends
Comments