Rita, Sue & Bob Too / A State Affair

This bleakly and uncompromisingly powerful double bill about life in
Bradford, first seen in London last December at Soho Theatre, now makes a
welcome return to the same venue in Max Stafford-Clark‘s pungently acute
production.

There is no finer director of contemporary plays in the country than
Stafford-Clark, period. The founder of Joint Stock and former artistic
director of the Royal Court, he has always kept professional faith with new
writing and has never sold out to the greater possible riches of the
commercial theatre or Hollywood. His current independent company, Out of
Joint, is one of the most in-synch, serious-minded around.

It was Stafford-Clark who originally commissioned and directed the original
production of the first half, Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too,
while he was at the Court in 1982. Now he has commissioned an instructive if
dispiriting sequel, A State Affair, compiled by Robin Soans from
verbatim interviews on the same ground where the first play was set. But
Stafford-Clark is not only an outstanding facilitator of new work, he is
also a superb interpreter of it, and creates a theatrically combustible
combination by pairing them together in this remarkable coupling of works.

Singly, they are both potent enough; but seen together, the power of each is
stoked up so that they resonate against one other even more fiercely.
Dunbar’s raw, vivid slice of everyday life in Thatcher’s Britain of the
early 1980s has the authentic whiff of lived experience, beautifully condensed
by a young, talented playwright’s sense of how vividly theatre can share
such events. Eighteen years later, with the pain of life on the same
Bradford estate both dulled and magnified by the ravages of drugs, Soans’
compilation of the actual words of some of its residents is bleaker and more
depressing.

The result is a deeply affecting and quietly devastating evening,
brought to piercing life by the kind of acting that doesn’t seem to be
acting at all. This is an evening of startling integrity, and not to be
missed.

– Mark Shenton