The Arbor

staggeringly moving ★★★★★ Time Out London

brilliantly realised, impossibly sad ★★★★ The Telegraph

a modernist, compassionate biopic ★★★★ the Guardian

Andrea Dunbar, the tenacious young playwright grew up on the notorious Buttershaw Estate in Bradford. When she died tragically at the age of 29 in 1990, her daughter Lorraine was just ten years old. Clio Barnard’s experimental documentary film The Arbor revisits the Buttershaw Estate where Dunbar grew up to tell the powerful true story of Andrea and Lorraine.

Also aged 29, Lorraine had become ostracised from her mother’s family and was in prison undergoing rehab. Re-introduced to her mother’s plays and letters, the film follows Lorraine’s personal journey as she reflects on her own life and begins to understand the struggles her mother faced.

Artist and director Clio Barnard also grew up in the Bradford region and in making the film she wanted to revisit the estate to see how it had changed in the two decades since Dunbar’s death. The artist recorded audio interviews with Lorraine, other members of the Dunbar family and residents from the Buttershaw Estate over a period of two years. These interviews were edited to form an audio “screenplay” which forms the basis of The Arbor as actors lip synch to the voices of the interviewees.

The Arbor premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2010 and was screened at the London Film Festival and across the UK from October 2010 winning:

• Best New Documentary Film-maker at the Tribeca Film Festival 2010
• Best British Newcomer & Most Original Debut at the London Film Festival 2010
• Best Debut Director at the British Independent Film Awards 2010
• Best Screenplay at the 2010 London Evening Standard Film Awards
• Best Cinema Documentary at The Griersons 2011

The Arbor is a BBFC certificate 15 film, duration 1 hour 34 minutes.

Video: An excerpt from The Arbor. This video is also available to watch on Vimeo and YouTube. 

Image: Production still of Lorraine Dunbar (Manjinder Virk) and Lisa Thompson (Christine Bottomley) remembering the bedroom fire that occurred in their childhood. Photograph: Susanna Wyatt.

Buy / Stream The Arbor

The Arbor is available for EST and TVOD in the UK and is also available to purchase on DVD and Blu-ray via the distributors Verve Pictures.

£2.99 buy from iTunes

£2.49 rent on Amazon

£6 on DVD from Verve Pictures

£8 on Blu-ray from Verve Pictures

Subscribe to watch on BFI Player (from £4.99/month)

Subscribe to watch on MUBI (from £9.99/month)

• Feature Running Time: 92 minutes
• Certificate: 15
• Colour/PAL
• Language: English, English subtitles

This trailer is available to watch on YouTube and Vimeo.

Image: Production still of Girl (Natalie Gavin) in a scene from Andrea Dunbar’s play, ‘The Arbor’, performed on Brafferton Arbor. Photograph: Nick Wall

An excerpt from Taking Stock: The Theatre of Max Stafford-Clark 

by Philip Roberts and Max Stafford-Clark

All theatres draw from a pool of professional writers. Any theatre takes pride in presenting new work by Harold Pinter or Caryl Churchill. But its focus on people who haven’t previously considered themselves professional playwrights is arguably the most important function of the Royal Court Theatre [where Stafford-Clark was Artistic Director from 1979 to 1993]. One way of becoming immediately involved in the grassroots was through the annual Young Writers’ Festival. This was a national competition open to any aspiring writer up to the age of eighteen. Plays by younger writers made particularly strenuous demands on the actors’ versatility. Talking cabbages featured in one play, and neurotic guinea pigs in another, while adolescence provoked a flood of gloomy dramas that invariably ended in suicide or unwanted pregnancies. Every year there were twelve-page bloody sagas on the death of Mary Queen of Scots, as well as vicious satires about eccentric schoolteachers....

Read the rest of this essay.

Reproduced by permission of Nick Hern Books.

Max Stafford-Clark is a theatre director who first staged the work of Andrea Dunbar. He is also former Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre and co-founder of Joint Stock Theatre Company and touring company, Out of Joint.

Image: Production still: Andrea Dunbar (Natalie Gavin) writing on her bed. Photograph: Susanna Wyatt

Born to Write and Die

by Lyn Gardner

When, at 18, Andrea Dunbar wrote The Arbor, The Mail on Sunday called her the new Shelagh Delaney, "a genius straight from the slums with black teeth and a brilliant smile". Andrea objected vehemently about the black teeth. "The thing about Andrea", recalls a friend, "is she didn't bullshit in life and she didn't in her plays." 

By the time she was 23, Andrea had given birth to three children, all by different fathers, and had written the award-winning Rita, Sue and Bob Too, a no-holds-barred slice of underclass life - "Thatcher's Britain with its knickers down". Like The Arbor, it was a big hit at the Royal Court, with audiences drawn by its notorious first scene in which two schoolgirls take it in turns to have sex with a married man in the back of his motor. The film director Alan Clarke, who had previously made Scum, got Andrea to write a screen version. Three years after the film's release, Andrea Dunbar was dead of a brain haemorrhage. She was 28 and left behind three children, three classic plays about northern life – her third, Shirley, was also premiered at the Court in 1986 - £45 in the building society, and a family at war...

Read the rest of this essay.

Originally published in the Guardian, 4 July 1998. Published with permission.

Image: Production still: Lorraine Dunbar (Manjinder Virk) in prison cell. Photograph: Nick Wall

Episode 3 of the Artangel Podcast, Memory

In a many-layered tour through the subject of memory, Clio Barnard joins Susan Philipsz and Mike Kelley as they reflect on how the theme relates to her Artangel project. Barnard and her fellow artists consider ideas of personal, geographical, musical, architectural memory.

Featuring:

• Poet Lavinia Greenlaw
• Scientist Steven Rose
• Historian Michael Sherringham
• Violinist Paul Robertson
• Author Rachel Lichtenstein
• Music from The Arbor soundtrack by Molly Nyman and Harry Escott
• An extract from Susan Philipsz's project Surround Me
• Compositions by Felix Carey, Andrew Pekler and Ruaridh Law

Producer: Peter Meanwell

Also available to listen to on SoundCloud.

Image: Production still: Scene from Andrea Dunbar’s play, ‘The Arbor’ performed on Brafferton Arbor. Characters include (from left to right); Young David (Robert Emms), Yousaf (Jimi Mistry), Girl (Natalie Gavin). Photograph: Nick Wall

Selected Press

Emotionally engaging, stylistically radical, and utterly unforgettable. – Mark Kermode, BFI YouTube channel, 16 Sep 2016 

Barnard has created a modernist, compassionate biopic: a tribute to her memory and her embattled community. — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 22 October 2010

The overall effect is devastating, as multi-layered and dissonant as a Schoenberg symphony, and a nightmarish impression of how the writer experienced both reality and performance. — Sebastian Doggart, The Telegraph, 21 May 2010

The Arbor, by Clio Barnard, is a remarkable film: conceptually acute, brilliantly realised, impossibly sad. — Sukdhev Sandhu, The Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2010

The actors are puppets of sorts, reminders of the hands behind the film, and the impossibility of miming perfectly reminds us that they’re reporting, not reconstructing. — Dave Calhoun, Time Out, 21 October 2010

Artist/filmmaker Barnard is daring: actors lip-synch to recordings of Dunbar’s loved ones, while archive footage shows the real playwright. Inbetween, The Arbor is staged on her estate. It shouldn’t work, but it does: an artsy yet accessible insight into working-class life. Moving, bold, unconventional and impeccably staged, The Arbor is a worthy tribute to a powerfully artistic voice. — Anna Smith, Empire Magazine, October 2010

Lorraine's testimony is incredibly important. There's such complexity around race for her and how difficult it was for her. [...] In some ways it's a film about Lorraine, rather than a film about Andrea. – Clio Barnard in conversation with Gareth Evans at an online event hosted by the London Review of Books, 17 June 2020

Images: (left) Clio Barnard, watches a scene from Andrea Dunbar’s play,‘The Arbor’ being performed on Brafferton Arbor, with a young resident; (above) behind camera on The Arbor. Both photographs: Nick Wall

Image: Production still of Lorraine Dunbar (Manjinder Virk) and Lisa Thompson (Christine Bottomley) remembering the bedroom fire that occurred in their childhood. Photograph: Susanna Wyatt

As it Goes

What we stopped here for, and what we talking about rubber johnnys for — Andrea Dunbar, Rita, Sue and Bob Too

For four nights only in October 2010, Andrea Dunbar’s inimitable, controversial and hilarious, brutally honest and deeply personal voice was remembered through a series of readings performed at the Young Vic.

To coincide with the release of filmmaker Clio Barnard’s award-winning film The Arbor, these events were produced to celebrate the unique power of one of the UK’s most distinctive and sorely missed playwrights. Each reading was accompanied by one of four new short plays inspired by Andrea’s work by teenagers from east London, followed by the screening of scenes from The Arbor.

On the final day of readings a panel discussion took place with Max Stafford Clark, Clio Barnard, Jo Carter and actors from The Arbor, with a reading of Robin Soans’ play, A State Affair (2000) which looks at life on a Bradford estate.

As it Goes was developed with the support of Janice and David Blackburn and Gilberto Pozzi. It was an Artangel Interaction commission in collaboration with Immediate Theatre and the Young Vic.

Further information about this event can be found via the Young Vic.

Image: Video still from The Arbor: Young Lorraine (Parvani Lingiah) dancing on the roof of her father’s car.

Credits

Presented by Artangel and UK Film Council in association with Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Arts Council England and More4. The Arbor is included in The Artangel Collection, a national initiative to commission and present new film and video work, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. 



Artangel is generously supported by Arts Council England and the private patronage of the Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.

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