Theatre becomes urgent, relevant and absolutely crucial in this double bill of plays. Both are set on Bradford's Buttershaw estate, one of Britain's deprived housing schemes, wracked over the past 40 years by unemployment, poverty and cheap heroin.
In Buttershaw you find what right-wing sociologist Charles Murray calls "the underclass"; in reality, struggling single mums trying to bring up their kids decently on no money, no hope and in the absence of men who have become redundant in every sense. As Mum says in Rita, Sue and Bob Too, written in 1982 by the then 21-year-old Andrea Dunbar: "Anyway, all men are no good. They want shooting for all the trouble they cause." There was something prophetic in those words.
Rita, Sue and Bob Too was the second of three plays that Dunbar wrote before a fatal brain haemorrhage at 29. This grim little comedy about two 15-year-old girls' affair with the same married man, was one from the heart. She only wrote about what she knew. Max Stafford Clark, then director of the Royal Court, commissioned the play and now revives it and pairs it with a new work, A State Affair by Robin Soans. Soans's play is a piece of verbatim theatre created via interviews with people who live in Buttershaw today.
If, for all its mouthy, larky high spirits, Rita Sue and Bob Too has a hard-boiled desperate edge, A State Affair is like falling down a deep, dark well. It depicts a war zone where the front line consists of people struggling with understated heroism to hold their lives together and deal with the consequences of addiction, child abuse, domestic violence and lack of hope.
On its own, either play would have impact. Together, they cannot be ignored. One springs from the other. That was then and this is now. A State Affair ends poignantly with Dunbar's own daughter, Lorraine, a former drug addict, being given voice: "If my mum wrote the play now, Rita and Sue would be smackheads on crack as well... and working the red light districts, sleeping with everybody and anybody for money."
Max Stafford Clark's production is matter of fact, unobtrusive and best of all, honest. So are the performances. It never lets you forget that, in reality, there are people on the Buttershaw estate who are living this piece of theatre every day.
Until November 4. Box office: 0151-709 4776. Then tours to Oxford, Colchester, Plymouth, Eastbourne, London, Bradford and Manchester.
