Rita, Sue and Bob Too / A State Affair

by Andrea Dunbar, Robin Soans

When it first came out, Rita Sue and Bob Too caused a sensation for it's frank portrayal of child sexuality in a Northern Town; the fact that the play was based on the writer's own experience only added to the furore. Max Stafford-Clark originally commissioned Rita, Sue and Bob Too for the Royal Court in 1982. Eighteen years later, he returned with a group of Out of Joint actors to the Bradford estates that Andrea knew. A State Affair is a record of what they found.

"A genius straight from the slums" - Shelagh Delaney (on Andrea Dunbar) Mail on Sunday

"This is life, the facts are there … these things do go on - maybe not in every circle, but certainly in mine" - Andrea Dunbar, Yorkshire Post, 1986

Out of Joint's production of Rita Sue and Bob Too and A State Affair premiered at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in October 2000.

Genres: Plays, Drama

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 19, 2000

About the author

Andrea Dunbar (22 May 1961 – 20 December 1990) was an English playwright. She wrote The Arbor (1980) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982), an autobiographical drama about the sexual adventures of teenage girls living in a run-down part of Bradford, West Yorkshire. She wrote most of the adaptation for the film Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987). The Mail on Sunday described Dunbar as "a genius straight from the slums".[1][2]

Reviews

[Jordan Phizacklea-Cullen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful record of a double-bill of a revival and new piece of 'verbatim theatre' from 2000, this mostly succeeds in recording the progress or otherwise of ways of living on Bradford's Buttershaw Estate from the birth of Thatcherism to the birth of Blairism. The verbatim conversations recorded in 'A State Affair' are frequently shocking, but shot through with some sense of hope for the future and the possibility of things starting to improve. There are helpful notes on the production, photographs and a guide to creating your own piece of verbatim theatre to round out this collection.

[Aislinn Evans]

only read a state affair, as wider research abt verbatim and clio barnards the arbor. only really works when contextualised by dunbars work of course. intense and grim, there are humanising moments but... well, im working on something interview based, maybe verbatim, and maybe theres an impulse, when short on time and all this, to draw out the profound stuff - the sad stuff, the suffering - and forget that the chaff, people bickering and showing human character, is an essential counterweight. but there are bits of that, especially around the drugs sanctuary and sue.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rita, Sue, and Bob Too is a really excellent play about working-class deprivation, despair, and abuse on a sink estate in the early 1980s, by a playwright (Andrea Dunbar) who died tragically young at 29 and would likely have gone on to produce a considerable body of work.

The child of a sink estate herself, Dunbar pours her own experiences of this life and these people into the play, which tells the story of a moderately successful (borderline lower middle-class) married businessman called Bob who in the opening scene begins a sordid relationship with his two teenage babysitters, Rita and Sue, both from a poverty-stricken background.

The play remains a must read in 2024 and I wish that a notable playhouse would stage a new production of it, because its subject is one that’s been constantly discussed in the wake of the Me Too movement, yet it completely avoids cliche and caricature. It’s an important play for teenagers to see since it illustrates without condescension or judgement, in clear and precise language, how abusers like Bob operate. How they blame others for their predilections, manipulate and gaslight their victims, and justify to themselves their need to abuse.

It would have been easy to descend into histrionics and pretentious monologuing that over-explains motivations, but Dunbar’s careful and realistic writing depends entirely upon believable dialogue and closely observed characterisation. Buried inside the sordid story is a sad and angry paean to friendship, how Rita and Sue behaved as they did because the world they lived in failed them, from absent and violent fathers to mothers who say that they dislike their men, though ultimately blame other women and girls for the abuse that they receive, calling them “sluts”.

None of this thematic work is on the surface, which is what elevates the play. Dunbar tells the story, then leaves you to decide what to make of it.

[Michael Rumney · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Adelle Stripe's fictional account of Andrea Dunbar's life in Black Teeth and A Brilliant Smile I decided to re-read this two plays. I have to say I'm not a fan of verbatim theatre and to me A State affair is basically a collection of statements by various characters with no real plot.
Although having read Black Teeth the final couple of speeches by Lorraine make a lot more sense and and it is extremely poignant,
I couldn't help comparing and contrasting the two plays, both are gritty but Rita ends with some hope where as I couldn't see any in state affair.
The speech lengths are much shorter overall in Rita which gives the play a bit of pace with some wit..
Soames in State Affair imagines the fate of Sue in 2000 and when I saw the plays together n January 2001 I questioned, what about Bob and Rita? What has happened to them.
I have these same questions now, along with If Dunbar had lived what would she have thought of State Affair and how Dunbar would imagine how Rita, Sue and Bob's lives had turned out in 2000 and beyond.