Sometimes a piece has to be reviewed in the context not of other work or of the world around it in general, but in terms of a particular immediate matter. The recently released film All The Money In The World cannot but be seen in the light of the stapling-in of Christopher Plummer to replace Kevin Spacey, jettisoned after accusations of sexual misconduct. Similarly, Out Of Joint’s revival of Andrea Dunbar’s 1982 play Rita, Sue And Bob Too arrives in London towards the end of its tour amid a sexual scandal.

In mid-December, Royal Court artistic director Vicky Featherstone announced that the theatre would not be presenting the production because it was initiated by Out Of Joint founder and former Royal Court supremo Max Stafford-Clark, who has been accused of unwelcome sexual remarks and behaviour going back decades. No matter that this decision was made some three months after the Stafford-Clark story broke (a period in which Featherstone’s Court proved courageous and pioneering in creating a public space for conversations about such matters), and only four weeks before the production was due to arrive; nor that Stafford-Clark had in fact left the production early in its rehearsal period and effectively all the work on the show has been done by Kate Wasserberg; “the staging of this work, with its themes of grooming and abuses of power on young women, [...] now feels highly conflictual,” said a public statement.

There was an outcry: the theatre was accused of misinterpreting the degree of agency and autonomy of the two 15-year-old girls in the title, who begin affairs with a married man, and also of – ironically for a self-styled writers’ theatre – stifling the authorial voice of a working-class woman, who could no longer argue her own case (Dunbar died in 1990, aged 29). Two days later the Court reversed its decision and announced that the play would be presented as originally scheduled. And now here it is.

Watching it in this context (as I say, you can’t watch it any other way), it becomes apparent that grooming and underage sexual abuse are not what Dunbar is concerned with; she gets some mileage out of Bob’s lying protests to his wife that “I couldn’t do a thing like that” whilst doing it on a regular basis, but – again ironically – she writes about this activity not because it is what it is, but because it is a way into the world in which it takes place. The assorted characters live on the run-down Buttershaw estate in Bradford (so did Dunbar), in the economic winter of first-term Thatcherism: Sue’s family cannot afford to buy her gym kit for school, anxiety over a shortage of work drives Bob impotent. Families are at each other’s throats not in moral conflict, but because there is hardly anything to eat besides one another. Director Kate Wasserberg and sound designer Emma Laxton punctuate the 80 minutes of action with snatches of ’80s pop hits such as “Tainted Love” and “Don’t You Want Me”, slowed down but not pitch-shifted so that they sound mournful and even sinister. Tom Shortall’s set consists of little more than four old-fashioned car seats (Bob’s car being the usual venue for the extra-marital “bothering”).

Taj Atwal, Gemma Dobson and James Atherton as the titular trio lead a cast of six. All walk a canny line: the “girls” neither fetishise childhood innocence nor exaggerate their knowingness, Atherton does not play up Bob’s hypocrisy nor attempt to disguise it. Samantha Robinson as Bob’s wife and Sally Bankes as Sue’s mum are likewise neither innocent nor wicked, but flawed and complex. The climactic street-brawl scene is all about the infidelity and the extent to which the girls are or are not to blame, with age playing no part in the matter. We end up feeling sometimes that Dunbar’s writing is naive, but rather more often feeling guilty that “naive” is just a label we are using to avoid having to acknowledge it as honest and direct.

Written for the Financial Times.