Rita, Sue and Bob Too – Library Theatre, Sheffield

Writer: Andrea Dunbar

Director: Andrew Ashley

Andrea Dunbar’s 1982 bleak comedy has been revived by Diva Productions, which launches a two month tour in Sheffield’s intimate Library Theatre. Inspired by her own experiences of growing up in working-class Bradford, during the Thatcher years, Dunbar’s play captures a particular period, from a very specific perspective.

Rita and Sue are two sassy girls from homes that are either dysfunctional or“broken”. Thriving on parental neglect, the teenagers earn money by regularbabysitting for Bob and Michelle’s children. Extending the car journey to drop the girls home, Bob introduces both of them to sex. Firm friends (up to a point), they share his favours and look forward to a weekly “jump” in his smart motor, scorning the juvenile approaches of boys their own age. Bob has previous form in seducing babysitters, and a testy relationship at home. The threesome implodes when word leaks out about their trysts, and the family dynamics of everyone concerned is shredded.

As a “slice of life” snapshot of a deprived community, with some depravedbehaviours, it is recognisable, and relatable. While it makes the most of its 1980’s cultural references, to the delight of an audience which mostly grew up in those years, its central focus is on how men and women treat one another. And thepicture is stark. Almost all the couples squabble and fight, argue about sex or the lack of it, have combustible flare-ups, threaten violence, and use abusive language towards one another. Fathers threaten violence to daughters. Daughters swear back. Those with power in the relationship use it to coerce compliance. Those without it seek out weaknesses to exploit.

This touring production is light on its feet. Sets are sufficient to set the scene,signalling the social rank of the household with a few items: framed pictures, tackyornaments, lager cans, back projection of flock wallpaper. Bob’s car has a plushinterior, and the front seats recline. Useful, considering the primary purpose of the passion wagon. Scene changes are slick, accompanied by strobe disco lights and a mix of cheesy pop and dance music from the era. The audience sang along to every tune. Full screen footage gives a wider picture of the fragmentation of 1980’s Britain: Miners’ strikes, the Falklands War, Chernobyl, the Poll Tax riots, Ulster atrocities, et al. Tory Party Conference speeches by Margaret Thatcher are greeted with howls of derision.

This is a fairly inexperienced cast, but it scarcely shows. Dale Vaughan’s Bob is an audience hate figure for his exploitation of Sue and Rita, and his menacingbehaviour towards wife Michelle. But he also shows signs of a more complexunderstanding of the way the world works. He may have to sell his car because work is drying up, but he sees this in terms of Tory attacks on manufacturing andmining. He uses proper nouns for things, and swears less than most of the other characters. He is not “posh”, but he may sometimes read a paper that does not have Samantha Fox on page 3.

Louisa Maude plays Bob’s wife Michelle, who is probably the most sympathetic character in the play. Her ideal life is pulled apart by Bob’s infidelities, he humiliates her in front of Rita and Sue, but she still has enough command to set up warning signs on his wayward path. She also secures one of the loudest cheers of the evening in an argument with Bob about their sex life with the coup-de-grace:”You’ve never made me come.”

Alison Gibson and Andrew Ashley as Sue’s Mum and Dad have a relationship that was probably always doomed but has somehow lasted the course. They battle and skirmish, snipe and threaten, swear and abuse one another, but inertia keeps them perpetually returning to the same domestic disaster zone. They are at the centre of one of the play’s highlights: a vitriolic showdown amid the detritus of a run-down council estate. Most of the cast enter from the back of the auditorium, bantering in character as they stagger and lurch onto the stage, to the delight of an audience which has already taken them to their hearts.

At the heart of the drama are Rita and Sue, played by Emma Hooker and Polly Lovegrove. They inhabit the characters so fully that we actually feel we arewatching them growing up during the course of the play. They squabble andchatter like children in the early scenes, but are older, sadder, more wounded by the play’s end. Still girlish, but with regrets, guilts and shames, unknown to their younger selves. Above all else, we believe in their friendship, however flawed.

This is a play better known as a film, made in 1987, which turned a bleak comedy into a bawdy rom-com. And it is the film, or nostalgia for it, which drives much of the attraction for this revival. But Andrea Dunbar deserves better. She turned the misery of her own defective upbringing, married to acute observation, empathy for the underclass, and experience of the worst of human relationships, to a great ear for comic dialogue, and some residual shred of hope for better. This feels like a tribute act to a tribute act. It is a good tribute act; but the heart of the original is missing.

Touring nationwide until 25th October 2024