No hard feelings, Andrea

It was in May, 1987 that the residents of Bradford's Buttershaw estate demanded a confrontation with their neighbour, Andrea Dunbar.

"She's got to answer questions on what she's said about this estate," said a woman at a protest meeting.

At issue was not so much what Dunbar had said as what she had written about Buttershaw.

Her play, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, had just been turned into a feature film. No-one in Bradford had seen it yet, but all the same, they knew they didn't like it.

Councillors went so far as to call for a ban. Dunbar, meanwhile, had, according to the T&A at the time, gone to ground.

Rita, Sue and Bob Too painted a sorry picture indeed of Bradford generally and Buttershaw in particular.

The place was, if you believed what Dunbar had written, (and why wouldn't you? - she'd based it on her own life) alive with teenage promiscuity, drugs and adulterous sex.

"I had no idea that this was anything other than a normal film when I let my 16-year-old daughter take part in it," said a mother who'd had no qualms about pocketing an extra's fee from the film company.

As Bradford sought recrimination, the victim of its hostility retreated increasingly to the isolation of the Beacon pub, and to drink.

It was to take a tragedy to thaw the city's attitude towards her. A little over three years after the film was released, Andrea Dunbar was dead, the victim of a brain haemorrhage. She was just 29.

Now that she could no longer air its dirty washing in public, Bradford began to realise just how significant a literary talent it had lost.

The author of three critically-acclaimed plays, the first written as a CSE project and later commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre, Dunbar had been feted in London but chose to remain in Buttershaw, where she felt she belonged. The tragedy was that not all her neighbours felt the same.

How will they feel now, as Yorkshire prepares to revive Rita, Sue and Bob Too, in its original stage version?

According to its director, the West Yorkshire Playhouse's Natasha Betteridge, time has healed a few wounds.

"I hadn't been to Buttershaw before," she says, "and to be honest, I thought it was going to be far worse than it was. I'd built up this picture of it in my head.

"But I was amazed by the warmth of the people and by the welcome I got in The Beacon. There's a real community spirit there still.

"Everyone I asked - and I did literally just ask anybody, because I decided I had to be brave about this - had seen the film five or six times. They all said they knew Andrea and lots of them claimed to be related to her."

It was the area's schools, Betteridge says, which brought home to her the reality of estate life; the life of which Dunbar had written a decade earlier.

"They didn't look good," she admits. "I found them difficult to take on board. I thought, if that's your starting point in life, where do you go from there?"

Dunbar's play, the plot of which concerns the married Bob's carryings-on with his teenage babysitters Rita and Sue, was conceived in 1982 and has become, says Betteridge, something of a time-capsule drama - not least in its references to the changes Mrs Thatcher was then wreaking on the working class.

"The morality hasn't changed - it wasn't taboo then and it isn't now. But I think that until Labour got in last year, we were scared to look back on the Thatcher years. Although she wasn't in power, we were still empowered by her.

"People forget now just how unpopular the Thatcher government was in its earliest years. Unemployment figures were astronomical."

The challenge in presenting Rita, Sue and Bob Too to a Yorkshire audience now, says its director, lies in preserving its authenticity.

"Where there was any tendency towards theatrical 'artiness', I've stripped it away. The reality of the play is too strong to present it in any stylised fashion.

"The other challenge is in doing it so near Bradford. We're having to really work on getting the accents right - while at the same time making sure that people from outside the city can understand it."

The stage version of the play differs from the film in its conclusion and also in Bob's character. Instead of the self-made, home-owning philanderer of the film, he is seen here in Dunbar's original image - as a mid-20s odd-jobber who has worked his way up to the status of car-owner but is being beaten back down by the iron hand of the Iron Lady.

"By the end of the play, Mrs Thatcher's taken away all the work," says Betteridge. "She's made it too difficult for Bob to survive because no-one's got any money to pay him. He ends up fiddling his dole."

The West Yorkshire Playhouse describes Rita, Sue and Bob Too as an Eighties classic. "It's not the experimental play it once was; it's an established piece," Betteridge says.

Dunbar herself, writing in 1987, acknowledged that the play had "probably upset some people - councillors who wanted to show a fairytale side to Bradford and ignore its darker elements".

"The facts are there," she insisted. "And just because the guardians of our morals stand back and gasp, these things do happen. Maybe not in their circles, but certainly in mine."

She was clearly writing from the heart. Dunbar was mother to three children by different fathers; she had been pregnant at 14, suffered a still birth and endured the tyranny of a drunken father. It was, as she said, real life - and Bradford may yet thank her for writing it down.

At her funeral, the Rev Arthur Tuffee, as if anticipating a revival of interest, said: "Her voice has been heard throughout our nation and will continue to speak.

"Perhaps her departure may even help her to speak louder."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.