Rita, Sue and Bob Too and a State Affair

Rating:
Summary: Interesting glimpse of a playwright maudit
Review: Andrea Dunbar was one of those creators like Genet or Burroughs who occasionally emerge from the underclass/underworld to titillate and amaze the privileged literate with their dark visions of life among the subproletariat. "Rita Sue and Bob Too," her play about two teenage welfare mothers-in-the-making and their disastrous threesome with a married man, is best known for its 1987 film incarnation, for which Dunbar's original script was considerably slickered up for mass consumption, as can be seen in the unapologetically raw, hauntingly real scenes of teenage hilarity and misery printed here. Reading the biographical information included in this volume about Dunbar and her short-lived career as a playwright during her teens and early twenties, one doesn't so much mourn the loss of a promising dramatist who died young as admire the sensitive, perceptive people at the Royal Court who gave her a chance to express what she could about the dismal life she led before it dragged her down irretrievably.