Out of Print: Andrea Dunbar
Andrea Dunbar’s 1977 *The Arbor* begins with this sparse but telling stage direction: “The GIRL was with her boyfriend. They were at his friend’s. She had known the BOY for ages but had only been going out with him for three months.”
| Fierce … from left, Emily Spowage as Andrea Dunbar and Lucy Hird as her younger self, Claire-Marie Seddon and Balvinder Sopal. Photograph: Tim Smith |
Ambassador, Bradford
At the pub, the night before her untimely death, the acclaimed playwright spars with her younger self in this tender adaptation of Adelle Stripe’s novel
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THEATRE | Interview
Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile
As new play Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile comes to the Yorkshire stage, ADELLE STRIPE, LISA HOLDSWORTH and KASH ARSHAD talk to ANNA CALE about taking Andrea Dunbar’s work back to her community.
10 May 2019
A new play about the life of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar, staged by Bradford based Freedom Studios, is about to open. Adapted from Adelle Stripe’s non-fiction novel of the same name by screenwriter Lisa Holdsworth and directed by Kash Arshad, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile tells the story of Dunbar’s chaotic life on the Buttershaw estate in Bradford, as she struggles to write her latest work while battling her demons.
| Lucy Hird and Emily Spowage in rehearsals of Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, a play by Freedom Studios. Photo by Tim Smith. |
Set and shot in and around her home city, it was adapted by Dunbar from her 1982 stage play and told the story of two teenage girls and their relationship with an older married man. It was quite unlike anything anyone had seen before but its titillating tagline ‘Thatcher’s Britain with its knickers down’ somehow trivialised its gritty subject matter. Yes, it was funny but it had a dark underside.
| Andrea Dunbar |
Dunbar’s bleakly funny tale of a menage a trois captured 80s austerity. What can her defiant heroines tell audiences today?
‘This is life,” Andrea Dunbar told the Yorkshire Post in 1987, defending the film version of her play Rita, Sue and Bob Too. “The facts are there.” Dunbar was adamant about telling the truth in her work, insisting “you write what’s said, you don’t lie”. Her second play, an unvarnished tale of a married man having an affair with his teenage babysitters, still has that startling matter-of-factness today.
| ‘It’s a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate’ … Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes, in white skirts, as Rita and Sue, and George Costigan, far right, as Bob. |
George Costigan: ‘I watched the premiere with my wife on one side of me – and my mother on the other’
Rita, Sue and Bob Too really happened. Andrea Dunbar, who wrote the play and the screenplay, had an affair with a married man, having sex with him in his car, along with her friend Eileen. I commissioned the play as a follow-up to her 1980 drama The Arbor. Andrea was the most talented and original young writer I’d ever come across.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jbf477OqjI
Alan Clarke, who directed the film adaptation, cannily gave it an upbeat ending, which Andrea hated. She said: “You’d never go back with somebody who had betrayed you.” She told me not to go and see it. But the judgment of people involved with the film had been astute. It was successful, which did us a great service in terms of reviving the play, even if their version is a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate.
| Andrea Dunbar, photographed at home on the Buttershaw estate, Bradford in the early 1980s while writing her play Rita, Sue and Bob Too. Photograph: Don Mcphee |
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MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE ARBOR'
Our introduction to “The Arbor,” Clio Barnard’s tightrope-walking experiment with fact, fiction and the spaces in between, is the sight of two mangy curs nosing through trash. Their appearance is our first clue that the leafy green serenity suggested by the film’s title is unlikely to materialize.
Sure enough, within seconds we’re immersed in a sad, sorry tale of terrible choices, brightened not at all by the brief flare of fame. Ostensibly a biopic of the British playwright Andrea Dunbar — whose writing vividly chronicled life on a primarily white and profoundly racist council housing estate in West Yorkshire — this multidimensional collage explodes our expectations of the form.
| Manjinder Virk as Andrea Dunbar's daughter Lorraine |
But then, Dunbar explodes most people’s idea of a successful playwright. By the time she died — as she had lived, in the pub — in 1990 at the tragically young age of 29, she had had three works performed at the prestigious Royal Court Theater in London (and one made into a film) while producing three children by as many partners. This last accomplishment would be mirrored by her older daughter, Lorraine (sensitively played as an adult by Manjinder Virk), who also inherited her mother’s fondness for addictive substances and abusive men.
Finding its voice in Lorraine’s anguish, “The Arbor” (named for Dunbar’s first play, written as a school assignment when she was just 15) gradually evolves into a lacerating study of generational damage and the legacy of neglect. Wrapping truth in a blanket of artifice, the director uses actors to lip-sync prerecorded interviews with Dunbar’s family and friends, producing an effect that’s at once aggressively theatrical and devastatingly intimate. Viewer and confidante become one as the actors recite their lines directly to the camera, their bodies positioned and lighted to form visual punctuation that pierces more deeply than any faithful re-enactment.
| Andrea Dunbar |
Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, “The Arbor” springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar’s prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play. And at the end, when we hear Lorraine describe estate residents as “going down a big steep hill into a big black hole,” we know that her mother bequeathed more than just hurt, fury and a gift for self-destruction.
The Arbor Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Clio Barnard; director of photography, Ole Bratt Birkeland; edited by Nick Fenton and Daniel Goddard; music by Harry Escott and Molly Nyman; production design by Mat- thew Button; costumes by Matthew Price; produced by Tracy O’Riordan; re- leased by Strand Releasing.
At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. In strong Yorkshire dialect, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Christine Bottomley (Lisa), Neil Dudgeon (Steve), Robert Emms (David Dunbar), Natalie Gavin (Andrea Dunbar), Jimmy Mistry (Yousaf ) and Manjinder Virk (Lorraine).
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Dunbar came from that part of Bradford's tough Buttershaw estate known as "the Arbor". Barnard has interviewed Dunbar's family, friends and grownup children and then got actors to lip-synch to the resulting audio soundtrack, talking about their memories. Passages of Dunbar's autobiographical plays are acted out in the open spaces of the very estates where she grew up, surrounded by the (presumably real) residents looking on. The effect is eerie and compelling: it merges the texture of fact and fiction. Her technique produces a hyperreal intensification of the pain in Dunbar's work and in her life, and the tragic story of how this pain was replicated, almost genetically, in the life of her daughter Lorraine, who suffered parental neglect as a child and domestic violence and racism in adult life, taking refuge in drugs in almost the same way that Andrea took refuge in alcohol. The story of Lorraine's own child is almost unbearably sad, and the experience of this child's temporary foster-parents – who were fatefully persuaded to release the child back into Lorraine's care – is very moving.
Dunbar's story, and her success as a teenage playwright in Max Stafford-Clark's Royal Court, challenges a lot of what we assume about gritty realist theatre or literature from the tough north. In many cases, it is produced by men whose gender privileges are reinforced by university, and who have acquired the means and connections to forge a stable career in writing. However grim their plays or novels, there is a kind of unacknowledged, extra-textual optimism: the author, at least, has got out, has made it. Dunbar hadn't got out; she did not have the aspirational infrastructure of upward mobility. In the end, she was left with precisely those problems she depicted. Barnard has created a modernist, compassionate biopic: a tribute to her memory and her embattled community.
THE GUARDIAN
| Andrea Dunbar |
Innovative documentary The Arbor uses lip-synching techniques to give life to audio interviews telling the story of tragic playwright Andrea Dunbar.
The raw, working-class realism of 1986 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too - written by Dunbar and set on Bradford's Buttershaw estate - has helped to make it a cult classic.
Her story of the friendship between two schoolgirls who begin an affair with a married man was straplined: "Thatcher's Britain with her knickers down."
"I really love the film, I really love the friendship between the two girls, I really love the fact that it doesn't really moralise about them enjoying sex," says the documentary's director Clio Barnard, also from Bradford.
"But I suppose I didn't really know much about Andrea so I hadn't really realised where that writing came from, or where that talent came from, and I didn't know her plays."
The director's journey of discovery began with visits to the Buttershaw estate and Dunbar's street, Brafferton Arbor, to meet those who knew the writer - a heavy drinker who died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990, aged 29.
Interviews were recorded "to create a sort of a screenplay that you listen to rather than read".
Insightful reminiscences from figures from the writer's past - and two of the three children she had with three different fathers - are brought to life by actors who mime along.
"The actors did a phenomenal job because they had to learn it like a piece of music - technically it's very challenging," says Barnard, 45.
"In addition, they had to give a nuanced performance so I think they really did a remarkable job."
The "verbatim" technique used by Barnard was partly inspired by Dunbar's ear for raw dialogue that is such a central part of her autobiographical writing style.
"Part of what I really like about Andrea's writing is it uses peoples words as they say them, that it's verbatim - it felt important that it was in people's own words."
As Barnard's unique documentary progresses, the focus shifts from Andrea to what became of her eldest daughter, Lorraine, now 29 - the age her mother was when she died.
The interviews with Lorraine, a former drug addict, were recorded in prison where she was serving a sentence following the accidental death of her two-year-old son, who died after ingesting drugs.
Lorraine's interviews in The Arbor - mimed by actress Manjinder Virk - show that she shares Andrea's way with words, succinctly putting across her feelings about her mother's work, her bitter childhood memories and her own troubles.
"I think she can talk about very complex, difficult things, very directly with very few words - I think she's got a real gift for that," says Barnard.
Lorraine's younger sister Lisa, whose voice is also prominent, says watching actress Christine Bottomley mouth her words was "very strange - I had to keep pinching myself 'cos I thought it was me".
Lisa - who was 10 when Andrea died - has a more idolized view of her mother than sister Lorraine, who she says she has not spoken to for years.
"She used to always write at night-time in her bedroom," she remembers.
"In the morning, you'd go in and there'd be a little bedside bin and it would just be full of screwed-up paper."
Her abiding memory of the first time she watched Rita, Sue and Bob Too is of feeling "disgust at all the swearing".
"When I was 14, I saw it for the first time and everyone at middle school had seen it at about that time and everybody wanted to talk to me and sit near me."
Although Andrea Dunbar's masterpiece was made into a film by Scum director Alan Clarke in 1986, it was originally performed as a stage play - the writer's second - four years earlier.
Barnard's documentary is interspersed with both archive footage and excerpts from a modern-day performance of her first play - also called The Arbor.
Her debut work - which she began as part of a school project - was premiered at London's Royal Court in 1980 after her raw talent was spotted by theatre director Max Stafford-Clark.
Like Rita, Sue and Bob Too, it explores themes familiar to Andrea including abusive relationships, teenage pregnancy and alcoholism.
For the treatment featured in the documentary, open auditions were held on the Buttershaw estate ahead of an open-air performance to residents of the Brafferton Arbor.
The cast is led by former Buttershaw resident Natalie Gavin - a theatre studies student at Huddersfield University - who gives a wholly believable performance as a young Andrea.
Gavin, 23, says the atmosphere while filming the play on Brafferton Arbor was "kinetic" because residents "were involved in it and they were allowed to be in it, and it made it magic".
She says her involvement is fated because of the connections she shares with Andrea - they went to the same school and her father lived on Brafferton Arbor where he knew Andrea.
"I want to pursue my talent and she wanted to pursue hers," she says.
"She went out there and did it and that's exactly what I'm doing, through her, as well as being in her surroundings."
For Andrea's youngest daughter Lisa, meanwhile, the project has been "amazing - weird, but in a good way".
"I'm very proud of my mum.
"When I was younger, nobody really spoke about the film but, after she died and I understood more, it was like: 'That's her whose mum wrote Rita, Sue and Bob Too.'
"The only thing that upsets me is that she's not here to have this fame for herself.
"She didn't get much fame when the film first got released - it's after her death that it's all taken off."