CINEMA: The Arbor

The artifice of ‘play acting’ is at the heart of this quasi-documentary, fictional recreation of real life events and people.

Director Clio Barnard spent two years painstakingly piecing together interviews with the family, friends and neighbours of playwright Andrea Dunbar, who grew up on the Buttershaw estate in Bradford and died in her local pub at the age of 29 in 1990. Although best known for her play (and the film of) Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Dunbar’s life story is less to do with literature and theatre and more a tale of abuse, booze, single parenthood, and drugs coupled with a precocious writing talent.

But this is no straight to camera documentary; Barnard keeps the audience at one remove by having the audiotaped interviews with the real characters lip-synched by actors and then further muddies the waters by interspersing their words with scenes from Dunbar’s plays. The interviews give an insightful, often painful, picture of Dunbar and also shed light on the lives of her two daughters; the extremely troubled Lorraine (Manjinder Virk), who talks of her mother warts and all, and younger sister Lisa (Christine Bottomley), who very obviously adored her mum.

What emerges is a strange, hybrid film genre that at first seems oddly stilted and false — why not just have the real life characters speak their own words? But as the extent of the pain, darkness and utter desolation Lorraine has endured becomes apparent, this distance acts as a buffer between the viewer and a reality which is at times almost too terrible to bear.

Barnard is blessed with a cast that achieves the almost unachievable — making lip-synched speech look like it is tripping effortlessly from their mouths and yet, yet there’s a feeling that this artifice somehow detracts from the truth, somehow turns it into a play. Which in a way is a form of genius and a great tribute to Dunbar herself, for what she managed to achieve with her plays was to take her own reality of abuse and deprivation and turn it into thought-provoking entertainment.

Some will find the structure of The Arbor wilfully annoying and pretentious — and yes, it is a pretence. Yet, because the words you hear are in the real characters’ authentic voices, it also rings very true. What Andrea Dunbar herself would have made of it is anyone’s guess.