RITA, SUE AND BOB TOO, Dunbar, A STATE AFFAIR, Soans, Soho Theatre and Tourin

RITA, SUE AND BOB TOO: Andrea Dunbar (Bradford 1982)
A STATE AFFAIR: Robin Soans (Bradford 2000)
Out of Joint, at Soho Theatre

Runs: 1h 15m each play, till 12 January 2001, then touring till 10 March, Tkts, 020 7478 0100
Review: Vera Lustig, 6 December 2001

Impassioned, gripping double-bill about our neglected 'underclass'. A 20 year old play portraying life on a blighted estate is teamed with 'verbatim' theatre, the fruit of the company's interviews with people from the same locality.
There's more money churning around the bleak estates now than 20 years ago, when Andrea Dunbar wrote her unflinching, ribald accounts of life there. The drug pushers have muscled in, making a killing, literally.

Today the eponymous Bob, a recession-hit jobbing handyman, would possibly have resorted to dealing. He is a joyless wham-bam merchant with no qualms about screwing his under-age babysitters or treating his wife like a servant: superb Lise Stevenson, defiance in the tilt of her chin and in her flaunty get-up, yet, chillingly, servile and afraid. Matthew Watt's Bob is a blank, (though he excels as an addict in A STATE AFFAIR).

Emily Aston and Emma Rydal are spot-on, with their brazen strutting and feigned nonchalance. The cynical Sue (Rydal) has dead eyes and a flat, cawing, dirty-old-man laugh. Her home life is one of predictable turbulent squalor: her drunken father beats her.

Had Dunbar lived into the '90s, sexual abuse would probably have featured in her writing. It surfaces, along with parental and institutional violence and neglect, in the interweaving reminiscences of A STATE AFFAIR. Hope shines out, though, from the staff at an addicts' shelter, Agape House, who have also rebuilt their own lives through their work. Jane Wood, all careworn luminosity, is a curious mixture of prescriptive Christianity and indulgence, and like all the actors, never judges the person whose words she speaks. Agape House is brought to teeming life, as the staff are constantly called away from confiding in us, to deal with its demands.

Wryly amused, they apologise for these interruptions, and their humour is welcome. Still, every word, every story of sickening cruelty, of self-destruction. of lost childhoods and wasted lives, and the struggle to remain sane and whole, is shamingly true.

Cast:
Rita, Sue and Bob Too
Rita: Emily Aston
Dad: Ian Redford*
Sue: Emma Rydal
Michelle: Lise Stevenson
Bob: Matthew Wait
Sam: Gary Whitaker
Mum: Jane Wood

A State Affair
Tina: Emily Aston
Peter: Ian Redford*
Marie and Lorraine: Emma Rydal
Natalie: Lise Stevenson
Paul: Matthew Wait
Dean: Gary Whitaker
Sue: Jane Wood

* 28 Nov – 8 Dec Dad and Peter played by Paul Jesson

Director: Max Stafford-Clark
Design: Es Devlin
Lighting: Johanna Town
Sound: Frank Bradley

2001-12-14 20:58:47