The programme for this pair of striking plays is not a six-page oversize pamphlet but a complete volume, containing the text of both plays. It is introduced by Max Stafford-Clark's account of how green-biro-covered paper torn from a school exercise book alerted him to the existence of a fresh talent writing from the painful heart of things: Andrea Dunbar, then aged nineteen. While writing her second play she telephoned to ask how sexually explicit it was possible to be on stage. The answer is here to be seen: funny, sharp, moving and sorrowful, a literally and figuratively penetrating account of life on a council estate in Bradford in the early 80s – yet, as always with art, full of truth about life everywhere at all times.
      The story tells of two schoolgirls, someone else's husband, infidelity, marriage, family relationships, friendship, and change. It is played by a hugely talented set of actors. Emily Aston as Rita and Emma Rydal as Sue occupy their characters to the depths, giving performances glove-close to reality. They are brilliantly seconded by Matthew Wait as the attractive and priapic Bob, Jane Wood as Sue's housecoated tousled mother, and Lise Stevenson as Bob's cheated and desperate wife.
The girls, at their insistence, are being "jumped" by Bob in his car when he drives them home from baby-sitting. His wife Michelle knows he is being unfaithful, but she believes it is with someone else. The slow but then quickening fissures in the tenuous structure of these relationships ends with one of the girls becoming pregnant, and going to live with Bob who has left Michelle. The poignancies lie with those left behind in the change: Michelle, and the other girl. In this simple and familiar morality tale lies a large dose of truth and trauma.
      The play became a film; its true life is on the stage, in an intimate space. There it makes a compelling cameo become larger than cinematic.
In the summer of 2000 Max Stafford-Clark and the actor-playwright Robin Soans revisited Andrea Dunbar's stamping ground in Bradford, and talked to the locals. Andrea herself had died at the age of 29 in 1990. What Stafford-Clark and Soans found was a world changed and ravaged by heroin, and out of their interviews and observations Soans wrote "A State Affair", a powerful and disturbing sequel to Andrea Dunbar's original account. It is set principally in a refuge for young people struggling – largely unsuccessfully – to escape the many traps of addiction, and the brave people who work to help them do it. As in the first of the pair of plays, each of the cast excels.
AC Grayling