PAY WHAT YOU CAN TICKETS
Suggested: £6.00 (£4.50 conc.)
Dir. Alan Clarke
Year. 1987
Country: UK
Run-time: 93 mins
Rating: 15
Doors: 1.30pm Film: 2pm
10% discount on drinks. Just show your ticket at the bar.
Adapted for the big screen by Andrea Dunbar from her own stage play, this unexpected move into comedy from Alan Clarke (The Firm, Scum, Elephant) centres around working-class teenagers Rita (Siobhan Finneran) and Sue (Michelle Holmes). and their relationship with Bob (George Costigan) and Michelle (Lesley Sharp), a couple whose comfortable suburban life provides a dramatic contrast to their own. Taken in by Bob’s relative affluence and apparent worldliness, the girls soon find themselves part of a ménage à trois that uncovers sharp, knottily amusing insights into gender, sex, class, and 1980s Britain.
“A twisted comedic drama... a bawdy comic farce and a snapshot of northern working-class life under an increasingly repressive Tory government. Clarke’s cinematic adaptation pulls its audience into a chaotic world of booze, sex, condoms and council estates”
“One of those movies you talk about a lot afterward because the motives of all the characters are so complicated that you’re not absolutely sure just who came out ahead.”
“As authentic to the working-class 1980s as Abigail’s Party was to the aspirational suburban 1970s.”
