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Theatre listings
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Rita, Sue & Bob Too
by Andrea Dunbar Bradford
1982
and
A State Affair by Robin
Soames Bradford 2000
Director - Max Stafford-Clark
Assistant Director - Matthew Wilde
Designer - Es Devlin
Lighting Designer - Joanna Town
Sound - Frank Bradley
Company - Out of Joint with
Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and Soho Theatre Company
Venues & Dates - Traverse 12 - 16 Feb at 8pm Sat Mat
at 2:30pm then continues tour for details see Out of Joint's website
Reviewer - Kenny Morrison
One funny, one sad, both hardhitting.
Rita Sue and Bob Too- Out of Joint
Mum, Jane Wood, Dad Ian Redford and Sue Emma Rydal
© John Haynes 2001
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Rita, Sue & Bob Too
Those who remember the delightful film made of this 1982 play will be
pleased by it's revival by Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint Company.
Like so much of Out of Joint's work it is a somewhat depressing portrayal
of working class life, but extremely funny to boot.
Married father, Bob uses rather absurd techniques to seduce his two fifteen
year-old baby sitters in the back of his car on the Yorkshire moors.
The girls, Sue and the more timid and romantic Rita, are cynical, but
bold. Bob's basically a loser but as a bit of a wide boy he's able, not
only to take advantage of the two girls, but to treat his ife, Michele, dreadfully.
She is played not quite as convincingly. The necessary mix of superiority
and down-trodden inferiority don't quite work. Her outfits however are
a delight and absurdly funny to behold.
Bob ends up a slightly cliched victim of Thatcherism. He loses his wife
and his work, gets Rita pregnant and engulfs her in his own layabout life,
which he blames the rest of the world for. Rita, and Sue, gloriously
played by Emily Aston and Emma Rydal, are a tremendous mixture of youthful
naivety and precociousness, arising from their lives with their drunken
and poverty stricken families. During an hilarious slanging match, it's
clear the play is being given a feminist reading - it's always the women
who are given the raw deal. The play ends with a sort of velvet revolution
against men. Sue, her mother and Michele meet in a club and all state
how much better their lives are without men. I find the whole weak as
a moral tale, but an extremely funny piece of theatre.
A State Affair- Out of Joint
Tina, Emma Aston and Paul Matthew Wait
© John Haynes 2001
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A State Affair
This companion piece is a contemporary view of Bradford in the present,
eighteen years after the first. Sad, equally hard-hitting, though stylistically
very different.
A much more modern piece of writing, the cast engage the audience, talk
directly with them, and use quick-fire verbal briquettes to build a vivid
picture of turn of the twentieth century life. We soon realise that we're
being fed different visions of banal suffereing: battered wives and children;
experimentation with glue and other narcotics copying their elders; sexism
in the workplaces, and workplaces which nobody would really want to go
to anyway. Again, the men are alcoholic, violent and possessive. In
the context of the play, escapism through alcohol or drugs seems to be
not only the norm, but entirely necessary.
It's a very powerful story and shows Bradford as much worse, with less
of that misfelt nostalgia, as it was with Dunbar's original play eighteen
years ago. Redemption comes from Sue who runs a hostel for addicts and
the abused. She plays a Messiahanic role and trys to dig people out of
the hole the have found themselves in. Paul, an addict who will do anything
and rob anyone to feed his habit, is fantastically portrayed by Matthew
Wait. He is upsetting and pathetic.
It ends with a poignant speech by Lorraine, Dunbar's daughter: "if I
wrote a play...it would show some people getting their lives together
with a lot of courage and determination. But it would also show others
going down a big steep hill into a black hole."
The play is made up of actual conversations recorded in Buttershaw estate,
where Andrea Dunbar writer of Rita, Sue and Bob Too grew up. Some were
enhanced to make decent theatre, but on the whole, this is a contemporary
and actual view of life. It makes for a very worthwhile evening, both
chilling and extremely amusing.
© Kenny Morrison 7 February 2002
Cast of both plays
Rita/Tina Emily Aston
Dad/Peter Ian Redford
Sue/Marie and Lorraine Emma Rydal
Michelle/Natalie Lise Stevenson
Bob/Paul Matthew Wait
Sam/Dean Gary Whitaker
Mum/Sue Jane Wood
2001 -2002 Tour begins The plays had a previous tour in 2001
28 Nov - 12 Jan Soho Theatre, London 020 7478 0100 www.sohotheatre.com
14 Jan - 2 Feb West Yorkshire Playhouse 0113 213 7700 www.wyplayhouse.com
5 - 9 Feb Newcastle Playhouse 0191 230 5151 www.northernstage.com
12 - 16 Feb Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 0131 228 1404 www.traverse.co.uk
19 - 23 Feb Draoicht, Dublin 018 85 2622
25 - 27 Feb Town Hall Theatre, Galway 091 569777 www.townhalltheatregalway.com
6 - 10 Mar New Zealand Festival, Wellington www.nzfestival.telecom.co.nz
Tour ends
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