The Arbor

In a 1980 episode of the British arts documentary series Arena, the teenage playwright Andrea Dunbar explains that everything depicted in her surprise hit show The Arbor came straight from her life. She lived on Brafferton Arbor street in the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford and thus set her play there, became pregnant through her relationship with a Pakistani man and thus structured its plot around similar circumstances. Dunbar’s work was acclaimed for its lived-in, matter-of-fact treatment of lower-class life; Alan Clarke’s 1987 film adaptation of her second play, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, carried the tagline “Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down.” (Dunbar co-wrote the film but ultimately disowned it after a dissonantly upbeat ending was forced upon the story, which didn’t stop her from facing harassment from neighbors upset by its portrayal of the neighborhood.) But no accolades from the theater world helped her escape the deprivations of the Britain that Thatcher made. Dunbar spent time in a women’s shelter, was consumed by alcoholism, and died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 29.

Clio Barnard’s film The Arbor (2010) is equal parts a biography of Dunbar, a tribute to her work, a critical look at how her children have dealt with how she treated them, and an investigation into how Bradford had and hadn’t changed in the two decades since her death. Robin Soans had already made a theatrical documentary investigation into Dunbar with his 2000 play A State Affair, in which actors lip-synced recorded interviews with Dunbar’s family and neighbors. Barnard, who had used a similar conceit with her 2002 short Random Acts of Intimacy, turns to it again here.

The voices of Bradford residents and former residents—Dunbar’s children Lorraine, Lisa, and Andrew, along with some of her siblings, her aunt, friends, lovers, and more—are relayed through lip-syncing actors filmed around Buttershaw. But this is not merely a distancing effect, and Barnard continually deepens the film’s questions around the representation of reality in art. The dubbing actors can step between time and space in the blink of an edit; the same performers represent Lorraine and Lisa as adults and small children. An incident in which a mattress caught fire while they were trapped in the bedroom plays surreally, with a small fire burning behind the actors as they address the camera directly.

Scenes from The Arbor are staged in public areas in Bradford, featuring a mix of actors and nonprofessional locals. Interwoven are clips of contemporary news segments, A State Affair, the Arena episode, and the film of Rita, Sue and Bob Too. The actress who plays “The Girl” in scenes from The Arbor is introduced briefly dubbing an interview with Dunbar, emphasizing the autobiographical element of her writing. The Arbor makes it difficult to extricate the memory of Dunbar from her art and vice-versa, with fact, fiction, and fiction inflected with fact blurring together.

The Arbor screens this evening, July 24, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Verbatim.”