BLACK TEETH AND A BRILLIANT SMILE -
ADELLE STRIPE
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, we're told, but I say be even more wary of middle class people talking and writing about the working class because invariably they're going to misrepresent everything and all for their own ends. A middle class interpretation of working class life is never going to be genuine, and vice versa. It will only ever be an approximation at best. Jarvis Cocker in his lyrics to Common People came close to explaining this when he told the girl from Greece who had a thirst for knowledge how she will never understand. And that's the nub of it. To understand common people you have to be of and in among them. The voice of the working class can only be and come from the working class itself.
Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile, by Adelle Stripe, is the story of playwright Andrea Dunbar, most widely known as the writer behind the film Rita, Sue And Bob Too. It's a novelized biography, written through a combination of fact and fiction or as it's put in the introduction: 'This is an alternative version of historic events. It has been manipulated, re-structured and embellished. It is not the truth and exists purely within the realm of speculation.'
In itself, this is an important declaration to have at the start of the book that makes absolute sense come the end of the book. The insertion of it reflects well upon Adelle Stripe and shows she has an understanding of her subject matter. Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile is excellent. It's quite brilliant, in fact, in that it allows the true voice of Andrea Dunbar to come through between the lines without any judgement or manipulation of it.
To understand who Andrea was (she died in 1990 at the age of 29 from a brain haemorrhage) you need to have watched Rita, Sue And Bob Too, and to have an even better understanding you need to know that Andrea wasn't actually happy with the film. You need to know she wasn't happy with the London-centric metropolitan life it brought her into contact with. You need to know that she hated all the well-healed, middle class people her writing attracted; who pushed their business cards into her palm, who bought her drinks and told her how delightful she was. You need to know she thought all these people were cunts. You need to know what she meant by her use of the word 'cunt'. You need to know where she was coming from.
'Careers advice said I could be a shop assistant, mill worker, nanny or hairdresser. All of those sounded shit. I asked them can I be a writer and they laughed at me. What someone from here, a writer? You're living in cloud-cuckoo-land they said. Only the brightest get to do jobs like that. And there's no jobs for writers in Bradford. Don't get your hopes up lass. But I like writing I said. It's the only thing I'm good at. If you study hard you might become a primary school teacher or work in the bank. But that means no messing about they said. You have to be realistic.
At least I knew where I stood.'
Career opportunities the ones that never knock, as The Clash once sang, every job they offer is to keep you out the dock. So Andrea went to work at the local cotton mill before moving in and having a baby with a local Pakistani taxi driver whose abuse of her extended to him tying her to a kitchen chair to stop her going out. On escaping and ending up in a women's refuge house, it was there that Andrea met a social worker who happened to also work as part of a local theatre group.
'I write plays.' Andrea told her.
'Really?' the social worker replied. 'You might be the first person I've met in a refuge who has ever said that.'
The play that Andrea showed the social worker was called The Arbor and it ended up being staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London. 'She's like Alfred Wallis,' director Max Stafford-Clark declared. 'Primitive energy. This play is the dramatic equivalent of Wallis' paintings nailed to the wall of a fisherman's cottage. Her words are the leftover yacht paint. A world that many try to imitate, but few can convincingly portray...'
And so they were. Andrea's words captured the essence of working class life on an impoverished estate outside Bradford during the 1970s and 80s. A life battered by Thatcherite economics. A life out of view and out of mind. A life that amazed many in the middle class for not only existing but for burning so bright.
Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile is anger-inducing, it's laughter-inducing, and it's tear-inducing. It's not a depiction of 'Thatcher's Britain with her knickers down' as the strapline for Rita, Sue And Bob Too put it, but rather it's more like lifting the skirts of Thatcher's Britain and finding she's not actually wearing any knickers in the first place.
Black Teeth And A Brilliant Smile is brilliant.
John Serpico
