How do you put on a play about 15-year-old girls sleeping with a married man in 2023?

Dear members — there are things, many people believe, that simply can’t be said these days, such is the changing of tastes and sensibilities over time. And naturally, that applies to art too, be it books, films, songs or — as in this case — a play. Rita Sue and Bob Too, Andrea Dunbar’s 1982 play about two schoolgirls who have a fling with a married man, is a work that might be described as “problematic” in the lexicon of 2023. But is there a way to somehow make it work for a new era? We sent theatre aficionado Damon Fairclough along to find out.

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Your Post briefing

Instagram accounts that were responsible for the promotion of last Friday’s protest in Knowsley, which turned violent and saw a police van set alight, have been making plans for a repeat event. An account called lvplstopchecks has posted that it will be announcing details of the new event shortly (after another account which was key to promoting the first protest — aroundliverpool — was banned) and ran a poll of followers asking who would be willing to attend. They shared a post from scouse9800 telling followers to “Keep an eye open for next location @lvplstopchecks”. The account has also been asking for followers to share the personal details and addresses of Echo journalists, presumably in retaliation for the paper’s coverage of the protest. 

Gerard Woodhouse — the County Ward councillor, L6 charity boss and subject of our four-month investigation into the veracity of many of his claims espoused in the Echo and other media outlets — will stand as an independent in May’s all-out council elections after being blocked by the Labour Party. The party cited his “lack of campaigning or Labour activities” as reasons he will not be allowed to stand again under their banner, which he responded to by saying his food bank work and mental health issues had prevented him from campaigning at times. Woodhouse has represented his ward since 2010 but was informed he would not be selected again by the party last year and has since lost an appeal. He claims to be a victim of an anti-Corbynite purge and said in a statement: "I have not been removed due to complaints but due to my campaigning, putting letters through doors in the south of the city. I had medical notes, lost my mum and dad and had major surgery.”

Beverley Joyce from St Helens had become one of the world’s first patients to receive a pioneering new form of cancer treatment at the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre in Liverpool. The treatment, known as MOAT, is designed to help the patient’s own immune system fight the disease by giving them a modified form of the virus, and will be used alongside radiotherapy and surgery. Professor Christian Ottensmeier at Clatterbridge said: “I have been in Oncology for a long time and seen many things come and go — so to see this develop in the way it is currently doing is very exciting." Beverley is one of five patients in the world to trial the treatment and is currently being monitored after going through several rounds of treatment.

Post Picks

🗣️ BBC presenter and historian-in-residence at National Museums Liverpool Laurence Westgaph leads a walking tour of Liverpool’s links to slavery, meeting at the entrance of the Maritime Museum. It’s free and there are multiple dates to choose from. 

🥘 Guest chef Liv Alarcon invites you for a supper club on Liverpool’s quaintest street for “From Lark Lane with Love”. There’s four courses of seasonal food on offer, plus cocktails, all made with love. “4 courses of Amore, Amore, Amore” as they put it. Book here.

😂 Drown out the looming presence of Monday morning with laughter at Future Yard on Sunday night. They’ve got a new regular comedy night, Darkside Comedy Club, this time featuring Sam Avery, Lindsey Davies and Adam Staunton. Tickets cost £10.

If we’re not careful, the truth of being a teenager is quickly forgotten. Not so much the stuff we did — the larks and scrapes and near misses, the laughs and tears — but the truth of our assumptions and feelings about our place in the world.

At 15, it can feel as though the adult realm is just a whisker away, and in no time at all it will be ours to possess. But in so many ways we remain closer to being children than the grown-ups we so desperately want to be, and it’s within this state of psychological tension that the momentary drama of our teenage years plays out.

In Andrea Dunbar’s stage play, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, two 15-year-old girls traverse this territory together in ways that, four decades after it was first performed, have lost none of their ability to cause jaws to drop. After babysitting for Bob and his wife Michelle one night, Rita and Sue are given a lift home – Bob driving – when a detour over the moors turns into a one-after-the-other (Sue, then Rita) full-intercourse experience on the reclined front seat of Bob’s car.

The specifics may be invented but events and relationships portrayed in this startling play were drawn from Dunbar’s own teen years in Bradford, and being just 21 years old when she wrote it, it’s clear that for this unflinchingly honest playwright, the uncomfortable truth of those times never faded away.

Rita, Sue and Bob Too, first performed in 1982, was commissioned by London’s Royal Court following their production of Dunbar’s first play, The Arbor – a drama about a working-class girl of 15 who falls pregnant. Initially written as an English assignment at school when Dunbar herself was only 15, The Arbor also sprang directly from her own experience – her first child had only recently been stillborn. The brutal realities and desperate humour of Bradford’s Buttershaw estate, where she grew up and remained for the rest of her distressingly short life, were the bread and marge of her singular literary career.

When both plays were combined to create the 1987 film of Rita, Sue and Bob Too — Dunbar worked on the screenplay but disowned the studio-enforced ‘happy’ ending — her deeply deprived urban-rural edgeland estate became the setting for the decade’s latest state-of-Thatcher’s-nation Brit-comedy hit. If northern grit had enabled the BBC to conjure a string of Play For Today-style pearls throughout the 1970s and 80s, the new Channel Four took things a step further by turning such stories – often rooted in the contemporary Britain that lay far beyond London – into big-screen, cinema-packing gems.

Over 35 years later, the film’s frank and funny approach to what was always a transgressive (and illegal) relationship – older married man has regular sex with two 15-year-old girls who seem to enjoy it as much as he does – has helped it retain a cultish reputation and an after-image that lives long in the memory. The fact that it’s stuffed with a satchel full of fearsomely sweary one-liners – technicolour language in a pastel-shaded decade – has also helped.

One result is that Dunbar’s original play can pull in a larger and more committed audience than might otherwise have been the case – an audience hungry for some back-to-the-80s nostalgia and comic dialogue with more than a hint of a ‘you couldn’t get away with that now’ forbidden thrill. Whether a play that hinges on the grooming of two under-age girls is the right vehicle for a feel-good night out is a serious question, however, and it will always be interesting to see how any new production squares up to this not-insubstantial challenge.

For the Regal Entertainments version currently running at Liverpool’s Epstein Theatre – originally seen at St Helen’s Theatre Royal last autumn and now visiting the Hanover Street venue for a week — there appears to be no dilemma to address. As directed by Chantelle Nolan and manifested by its cast – including Michael Parr, Jessica Ellis and Crissy Rock — the play is a one-note cartoon romp that plays every moment for laughs. No matter whether it involves bums-out seaside postcard sexuality or an alcohol-soaked dad threatening brutal domestic abuse, every line is tossed out like a gag.

There’s no doubt that this can be one way to read Dunbar’s play – Rita and Sue’s confident best-friend bravado in the face of Bob’s sexual advances is there in the text after all, and in the context of this play, their irrepressible comic energy certainly feels as if it bestows on them some kind of power — but to deny the darkness that lies behind their situation and fail to treat the narrative arc accordingly seems staggeringly remiss.

That doesn’t have to mean crudely filtering the play, with all its authentic 1982 atmospheres and attitudes, through a twenty-first century prism and applying the moral conclusions we might now feel it demands. What Dunbar didn’t do was to deliver pat judgements even when dealing with subject matter as serious as this, and respecting that fact is part and parcel of taking the play on.

The truth that the playwright presents without compromise is that teenagers do behave in foolish ways — willingly so — without understanding the dangers or moral implications of what they’re up to. And further still, they may discern no danger at all, only excitement and opportunity, as they hurtle down that unmarked path towards an adulthood they think looks more fulfilling than the one lived by the adults they actually know.

Where we, the audience, see Bob’s unforgiveable abuse of his power over two vulnerable baby-sitting kids, Rita and Sue see a chance to find out what sex is all about while protected by the apparent safety net of their own sisterly bond. To transform this perilous situation into raucous comedy is Dunbar’s skill, but this production’s tragic misstep is to assume that their first wise-cracking, car-bound sexual encounter — an awkward but ultimately satisfying tangle for all involved — sets the comic temperature that every subsequent scene must hit.

With radio-mics cranked up to the max, there is little nuance across the play’s subsequent couple of hours. Under unforgiving lighting — like a studio-based sitcom of old — the characters lurch and grimace through their scenes, mugging and eye-popping with abandon as they hurl every swear word with the subtlety of a brick.

The unfortunate result of this ear-shredding onslaught is that Dunbar’s dialogue is left sadly exposed — every laugh seems increasingly forced. We need fluctuating dynamics in order to feel the play’s raw comedy and its bleak realities equally, but rendered at this relentlessly high pitch, it becomes an exhausting experience – one in which human tragedies are met with inexplicable guffaws.

Because yes, this is a production that provoked plenty of laughter around me on the night I saw it, and on that count it might be considered a success. Except that this would indicate that drunken threats are funny, and a discarded wife is funny, and even the play’s primary relationship — between an adult man and two children, let’s remember — is inherently hilarious, rather than being the means by which society’s sexual power imbalance can be examined, particularly on the social ladder’s bottom rung.

Rita Sue and Bob Too is always going to be a difficult play to deal with because its themes and approach sit well outside what might be considered appropriate today — but there’s a challenge in that, one that could be thrillingly rewarding to take on.

On the evidence of this production, however, it looks as though that challenge is far more tricky than the unwary might expect — and my sense of relief at finally escaping the auditorium tells me that a theatre rocking with giddy misplaced laughter can’t be taken as a sign you’ve got it right.

‘Rita Sue and Bob Too’ by Andrea Dunbar runs at the Epstein Theatre, Liverpool, until 19 February 2023.