‘It’s a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate’ … Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes, in white skirts,
as Rita and Sue, and George Costigan, far right, as Bob. 

How we made
Film

Interview

How we made Rita, Sue and Bob Too

Phil Hoad
Monday 26 June 2017

George Costigan: ‘I watched the premiere with my wife on one side of me – and my mother on the other’

Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of the Royal Court theatre

Rita, Sue and Bob Too really happened. Andrea Dunbar, who wrote the play and the screenplay, had an affair with a married man, having sex with him in his car, along with her friend Eileen. I commissioned the play as a follow-up to her 1980 drama The Arbor. Andrea was the most talented and original young writer I’d ever come across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jbf477OqjI

Rita Sue and Bob Too

When she was writing it, she said: “What can you do in theatre?” I knew she didn’t want a lecture on Brechtian alienation. What she really meant was: “Can you put shagging on stage?” She found the sex – and even the violence – on the Buttershaw estate, where she was from in Bradford and where her work was set, exciting. When the play got a certain amount of disapproval from her community for being so smutty, she was quite vigorous in saying these things happen, people should face up to them.

Alan Clarke, who directed the film adaptation, cannily gave it an upbeat ending, which Andrea hated. She said: “You’d never go back with somebody who had betrayed you.” She told me not to go and see it. But the judgment of people involved with the film had been astute. It was successful, which did us a great service in terms of reviving the play, even if their version is a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate.