Q&A with Erica Whyman

We went into the process carefully, knowing that Andrea’s writing deals honestly with themes of sex, gender, race and class. We were aware that in the 45 years since she wrote her work is likely to land differently. For this event we have explored some of the themes that we felt connected the three plays, and in particular female friendships, including the complicated ones between mothers and daughters, and also how she developed sophisticated questions around consent. We were also mindful to emphasise how funny and exhilarating her writing is. And we were really keen to showcase Shirley which is her least well-known play. But to be honest there is so much range in Andrea’s work we could have easily have selected twice as much!

Well in The Arbor there’s this great, free portrait of a place which emerges through a series of snapshots. In Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Andrea starts to play with structure, and the characters gain more nuance; the audience is required to think of Rita and Sue as being simultaneously very naive and, on the other hand, absolutely clear about what they want. And she finds ways to ask us to sympathise with Bob, which is hard to do; maybe even more so today when we’re living in a world that’s grappling with new ways to groom and exploit young people.

In Shirley the writing becomes even more sophisticated. Andrea’s starting to play with all sorts of new techniques. In the prison scene, and then later in the pub, you’ve got lots of conversations happening at the same time, influencing how we feel about characters and creating such a vivid sense of real life. It’s a hell of a technique to pull off and hold on to all of those conversations at once, but Andrea does this in a very complex, brilliant and funny way.

Kat and I have talked a lot about these layered mother and daughter relationships in Andrea’s writing because all three plays have that in them. The final scene of Rita, Sue And Bob Too is a difficult conversation between three women of different generations (Sue, her Mum, and Michelle who was married to Bob) but, despite everything that’s happened, Andrea manages to find the threads of solidarity between them. In Shirley it’s so expertly handled. Shirley’s relationship with her mother is worse than any of the others, but towards the end it also is more beautiful, more tender. And they do get round to telling each other some truths that are very loving without any sentimentality creeping in.

She uses humour very deftly to make sure audiences can cope with and stay with some of those dark themes. In terms of how we tackle it in rehearsals it’s about making sure that the actors are comfortable with how that humour works and not shying away from it. Sometimes it’s there for the characters, as a way of expressing the discomfort in some of the scenes because humour helps you cope in those situations; it gets you through.

A good example, is the famous scene towards the beginning of Rita, Sue and Bob Too with the two girls in the car. It’s obvious in the writing when they’re giggling to cover their unease and it’s gone too far for them but they don’t quite know how to get out of it. But then I do think she also finds her characters really funny, so for me there’s a responsibility not to be too po-faced about her work and to keep remembering that she would have hated that.

The pub scene in Shirley where she puts together a wild collection of characters who shouldn’t really be in the same room – you can see she clearly delights in the audience knowing that it’s all going to explode in any second.

It’s easy to forget that Andrea was interested in writing about joy and about freedom. She wrote female characters who were unapologetic about their desire and what they want from life and were wholly intolerant of other people telling them what to do. The sex in Shirley is very joyful and, even now, it’s still relatively rare to hear women talking about desire so straightforwardly. She also writes for a lot of very different male characters and just blows apart this myth around male sexuality and female sexuality. In Shirley we have Roy who leaves Audrey because he’s out-matched by her demands for sex. Andrea was ahead of her time and didn’t treat desire in a simple, binary way. With such a range in her characterisation I wish she could have gone on to write many more fascinating plays and screenplays.