THE ARBOR directed by Clio Barnard, with Christine Bottomley, Manjinder Virk, George Costigan and Jimi Mistry. A KinoSmith release. 94 minutes. Opens Friday (March 11). See listing.
Clio Barnard is trying to bring Andrea Dunbar back to life.
The English filmmaker’s new documentary, The Arbor, looks back at the Yorkshire playwright’s life and legacy. Dunbar stunned the London theatre community when her confrontational play about life in her working-class neighbourhood of Buttershaw, The Arbor, premiered in 1980. She’d started it when she was 15.
Dunbar wrote a second play, Rita, Sue And Bob Too, which was later brought to the screen by Alan Clarke. Further projects were derailed by her alcoholism and the responsibilities of raising three children. In 1990 Dunbar suffered a brain hemorrhage and died on the floor of a local pub. She was 29.
Barnard spent two years getting to know Dunbar’s children, friends and colleagues for her documentary project, also titled The Arbor. She conducted hours of audio interviews. And then she turned them into something remarkable – a verbatim theatre piece in which actors lip-sync the words of the people they portray.
“I’d made a film in 98 where I’d used lip-synching, but I didn’t really know about verbatim theatre,” Barnard says during a recent stop in Toronto at Doc Soup. “If you apply it to film, it makes you aware of the illusion instead of trying to kind of close the gap.”
It’s a daring tactic, constantly drawing the viewer’s attention to the disconnect between the speakers and the speech. What Barnard does isn’t quite recreation and it isn’t quite documentary, but it demands our full attention, immersing us in the story in much the same way Barnard found herself immersed in her subject’s world.
“I went into the Arbor [development] and met a woman called Gemma Norman, who was just brilliant,” Barnard says. “We got on very, very well. Her cousin is Andrea’s nephew, and through her I met a whole network of people very quickly. A lot of the people you see in the background are relatives of Andrea’s.”
Casting actors to play Dunbar’s family and friends was tricky. Wherever possible, Barnard wanted to use actors associated with Dunbar’s work, but they also had to be able to handle the technical demands of lip-synching. And all the actors had to find their own way into their characters.
“The actors made different choices,” Barnard says. “Manjinder [Virk] said, ‘I don’t want to over-analyze [Dunbar’s daughter] Lorraine,’ so she would ask me questions about her, but she had limits on how much she wanted to know. Whereas Monica Dolan, who played [family friend] Ann, went to Bradford and met Ann and spent time with her. It was demanding of the actors, because technically they had to be very accurate and learn everything very precisely.”
Barnard’s happy with the results – but more importantly, so are the residents of Buttershaw, for whom she screened The Arbor before its UK release.
“I was nervous about those screenings,” she says. “I don’t normally introduce the film, but I did there, and talked about the reasons why you might choose to make private grief public. The people on the Arbor who were not Andrea’s direct family have also responded really well to the film. There’s a real sense of ownership of the film, which I’m pleased about. That’s gratifying, that people feel it’s theirs in some way.”
Interview Clips
Clio Barnard on creating a visual experience out of audio recordings:
Barnard on assembling her cast:
Barnard on shooting in working-class Yorkshire:
normw@nowtoronto.com
