With the benefit of over 40 years’ hindsight, it is hard to see Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too without mentally hearing echoes of the comment she made when seeing her work being prepared for the stage – “It wasn’t so funny when it was happening”. Commissioned by Max Stafford-Clark and London’s Royal Court Theatre following the success of her first play, The Arbor, it takes the same themes of unemployment, boredom, teenage sex and – quite frankly – exploitation. For Dunbar herself the plays were almost certainly a mixture of creative energy and much needed catharsis, but for the theatre and its audience they were a source of unbridled comedy.
It is also difficult to disconnect it from the film that was swiftly adapted using material from both plays, which also capitalised on the comedic surface of the works, but over the decades successive stage directors have done their best to make this distinction.
In 2016/17, in the wake of #MeToo, a controversy erupted when Stafford-Clark’s company Out Of Joint were mounting a revival for tour. During the production process he himself was forced to relinquish his post amidst allegations of inappropriate behaviour, and the plug was initially pulled on the show, but after a backlash in both the industry and the media against ‘cancel culture’ it went ahead again with a new director. More gritty, and paying greater attention to highlighting the social issues raised by the text, it found new audiences and richly justified its ploughing ahead, despite how uncomfortably close to the bone it cut. If theatre doesn’t feel uncomfortable at times, it loses its power to communicate.
Rita and Sue are 15 year old school friends, and as the play begins in June 1982 they are coming to the end of their final term. They regularly babysit for Bob and Michelle and one evening Bob, while driving them home, decides to have a bit of fun with them both in the back of his car. This first shared sexual encounter between the three leads to an ongoing arrangement as the girls leave school and start a YTS job, but soon Rita is pregnant, her friendship with Sue is fractured and Bob and Michelle’s marriage is at an end.
Regal Entertainments’ production under the direction of Chantelle Nolan arrives at the Epstein following another hit run at St Helens Theatre Royal, where it has been a firm favourite for years. Billed as side-splitting comedy, it really makes a strong case for taking the humour at face value. Crissy Rock and Jamie Greer, who are Sue’s mum and dad, are the comedic heart of the show and their alcohol soaked laissez faire parenting is played to maximum slapstick effect. Jessica Ellis as Bob’s long-suffering wife Michelle has a less obviously funny role, but nonetheless her face is able to generate much humour in the subtext of her barbed commentary on Bob’s shenanigans.
So to the eponymous trio, with Michael Parr as Bob, Kay Nicholson as Rita and Jenna Sian O’Hara as Sue. Parr finds a good balance between seediness and charisma. His Bob has been around the block a few times and he’s sure enough of his prowess to believe that he is giving the girls a good time. His face however occasionally betrays the fact that he’s not always sure who is calling the shots. Nicholson and O’Hara’s Rita and Sue, whilst having most of the best witty dialogue, do succeed in making one significantly serious point, when they mockingly discuss how they duped Bob into believing their innocence by pretending not to understand how condoms work. At this point there is definite suggestion that the way the characters use each other may not be entirely one-sided. Somehow the emphasis of the idea that they are taking advantage of Bob’s gullibility appears to give him a get-out-of-jail-free card, which in turn gives the audience carte blanche to read the entire scenario as a joke.
There is a great deal of political subtext in the play (think of the film’s tagline ‘Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down’) about the exploitation of young people generally – in the ubiquitous YTS schemes of the period for example – and the way this breaks down self esteem and value, but much of this is lost beneath the laughter here. The management give a brief announcement as the show opens, warning that the play is performed with the text as written in the ‘80s, and that some of it might offend. The irony is that, played entirely for laughs, it fails to offend anyone. The author, probably, might have hoped that audiences would in fact be shocked and offended quite frequently, with that experience heightened by being sandwiched between belly laughs.
It is a sobering thought that Dunbar, whilst enjoying acclaim as a dramatist at 18, was pregnant at 15, suffered years of domestic abuse and was dead at 29. The inseparability of comedy and tragedy are shown nowhere as well as they are in the theatre – the art form that bears their two faces as its calling card.
Is it time to consign Rita Sue and Bob Too to the vault of plays no longer considered fit for consumption? Absolutely not, any more than we should stop re-running the TV sitcoms of the ‘70s, which found their own unique ways of calling out issues like racism and homophobia. Perhaps, though, we need to continue mining it more deeply for the nuance that makes us think twice about situations that might look hilarious from the outside, but which aren’t that funny when they are happening.
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| Kay Nicholson, Michael Parr and Jenna Sian O'Hara as Rita, Bob and Sue - Photo © David Munn |
Star rating: 3½ stars
This review was originally written for publication by Good News Liverpool
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