 |
| Andrea Dunbar |
Back to Bradford: Andrea Dunbar remembered on film
Mon 12 Apr 2010 21.35 BST
T
The film unit, it turns out, is in the next street, Brafferton Arbor, where Dunbar grew up, and after which her first play, The Arbor, was named. Written as a school project when she was 15, the play found its way to the artistic director of the Royal Court theatre, Max Stafford-Clark, who was impressed and staged her story of a Bradford schoolgirl who falls pregnant to her Pakistani boyfriend on a racist estate.
 |
| Dunbar on the Buttershaw estate in the early 1980s; some residents were furious about her portrayal of their home Photograph: Don McPhee |
Dunbar's brief flare of artistic brilliance brought her critical acclaim but little happiness. The success of The Arbor led to a further Royal Court commission: Rita, Sue and Bob Too. This told the tale of a Bradford man's trysts with his teenage babysitters. The piece was later filmed in situ on the estate, yet Dunbar disowned the project when the producers brought in additional writers to give the film a more upbeat (and somewhat unlikely) ending, in which the three characters remain friends. Worse still, she was threatened with violence by neighbours who thought the film portrayed them in an unflattering light; she also faced prosecution for claiming benefit without disclosing her royalties. Depressed and increasingly dependent on alcohol, Dunbar resolved to give up writing. In 1990, she collapsed with a brain haemorrhage in her local pub and died at the age of 29.
Ten years later, Stafford-Clark returned to Buttershaw with a team of actors and researchers to create a new piece of theatre, A State Affair, which documented the changes that had taken place in Bradford's poorer communities in the years following Dunbar's death. The play suggested that, despite a major regeneration project, conditions had hardly improved. Its final words were spoken by Dunbar's daughter Lorraine: "If my mum wrote the play now, Rita and Sue would be smackheads, on crack as well, and working the red light district, sleeping with everybody and anybody for money. Bob would probably be injecting heroin, taking loads of tablets as well."
Clio Barnard – a film-maker and contemporary of Dunbar, who grew up on the outskirts of Bradford – was intrigued by those words, and became curious to find out what had happened to Dunbar's three children in the 20 years since their mother's death. The production company Artangel commissioned a film centred around interviews with the playwright's family; but Barnard also wanted input from residents of the estate. Her solution was to illustrate the film with extracts from The Arbor, performed in the open air, on the street that gave it its name.
On this bright morning, the arrival of the film crew seems to have brought a festive atmosphere to Brafferton Arbor. Residents appear in shot, sitting on their garden walls enjoying the sun, as Barnard directs a scene using little more than a couple of handheld cameras and an old sofa. Children and dogs race around; at one point, a ball smashes into a trolley full of equipment. Nobody seems to mind. Many of the kids are excited that one of the actors is former EastEnders star Jimi Mistry, who also starred in East Is East. They crowd round him between takes, quoting chunks of his dialogue from that film.
Among the onlookers is Dunbar's sister Pamela, who still occupies the house next door to the playwright's former home. She seems pleased with the attention, but also discomforted: "I'm very proud of Andrea," she says, "but it's weird watching this – I mean, I was there at the time." The playwright's youngest son, Andrew, was only six when his mother died and has never seen her work. His expression is hard to read. "I don't remember much about my mum," he says. "It's freaking me out a bit. It's like watching my childhood played back."
Not surprisingly, some residents were wary. It helped that Barnard is from the area, but she had to work hard at gaining their trust. "I began by meeting them and talking to them for many hours without even a tape recorder, let alone a camera," she says. "Pamela was particularly helpful. Until I met her, I had no idea just how autobiographical the plays were. She told me that the Asian boyfriend in The Arbor was a real-life portrait of the man who fathered Andrea's first child, Lorraine."
Barnard wanted to know what had happened to Lorraine, who had left the estate some years ago and was rarely talked about. After further inquiries, it became clear why: in 2007, Lorraine was convicted of the manslaughter of her one-year-old son and sentenced to three years in prison. "I began writing to Lorraine," says Barnard. "She was in the drug rehabilitation unit of a prison in Surrey. She agreed to meet me, providing she wouldn't have to appear on camera. The story she told was hardly one I was expecting, and it led me to make quite a different film."
Lorraine's life story reads like the harrowing epilogue to one of Dunbar's plays. She was severely bullied as a child, and once overheard her mother claim she could not love her as much as her other children because she was mixed race. Following Dunbar's death, Lorraine became caught up in a cycle of addiction, and turned to prostitution to fund her drug habit. Her baby son Harris died after he swallowed a bottle of methadone belonging to his mother.
Although Lorraine wouldn't appear on camera, her story still features in the film – thanks to Barnard's decision to use actors to lip-sync the audio tapes of everyone she interviewed. This technique gives the film a slightly awkward feel, as if the testimonies have been dubbed from another language. Yet Barnard was keen to preserve this dislocated effect: "I wanted to maintain a sense of people speaking at one remove. Hopefully, it will remind the viewer that, however truthful a documentary attempts to be, it is always subject to the editorial decisions of the film-maker."
The use of actors enabled Barnard to introduce further layers of allusion to Dunbar's career. The words of Pamela are lip-synched by Kathryn Pogson, who played the unnamed, autobiographical character of "the Girl" in the original Royal Court production of The Arbor. The part of Dunbar's partner Jimmy "the Wig" is played by George Costigan, who was Bob in the filmed version of Rita, Sue and Bob Too. And in order to find someone to play "the Girl" in those open-air scenes from The Arbor, Barnard held auditions in a local school, which turned up a remarkable young actor from the estate, Natalie Gavin, who not only bears a striking physical resemblance to the square-jawed, red-headed Dunbar, but shares something of her explosive, pugnacious spirit.
Applause – and not a few tears
A few months later, the residents assemble at Bradford's National Media Museum to view an edit of the film. It is an extraordinary construct: a mixture of verbatim transcript and autobiographical drama that creates an echo chamber of conflicting voices from Dunbar's life and art. A hush descends whenever we hear the voice of Lorraine, whose resentment towards her mother remains palpable. At the end, there is applause, and not a few tears.
Barnard is relieved. "I was worried how people might respond to hearing Lorraine's criticisms of her mother," she says. "At one point, Lorraine told me, 'My mother had the audacity to drop down dead, five days before Christmas, and she hadn't even bought us a single present.' Yet we also hear the voice of her younger sister, Lisa, who insists: 'I think Lorraine still misses her mother, she just has a mad way of showing it.'"
The playwright's original champion and mentor, Stafford-Clark, makes an appearance, lamenting the fact that Dunbar's early death deprived us of the plays of her maturity. To an extent, A State Affair and Barnard's film take the place of those missing plays. "When I met Lorraine, I was struck by her articulacy; her ability to communicate complex emotion in succinct terms," Barnard says. "It led me to wonder whether she might have inherited her mother's gift. Yet, as Andrea's experience showed, genius can be a blessing and a curse. It was as if Andrea was condemned to tell her story."
No comments:
Post a Comment