Andrea Dunbar

Playright Andrea Dunbar emerged from a tough housing estate in Bradford during the late Seventies.
Her plays, depicting the brutality of life around her with a rough humour, were secretly written in school exercise books and championed by the Royal Court Theatre in London.
Her first work, written when she was a teenager and had never been to a theatre, was called The Arbor – named after Brafferton Arbor; the street on which she lived – and it was followed by Rita, Sue and Bob Too, which later became more famous as a film.
Andrea Dunbar died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990.
An extraordinary new film, The Arbor, follows the real lives of Dunbar’s children, Alison and Lorraine, and their personal struggles to cope with their mother’s legacy, one of abuse and sadness alongside her enduringly powerful plays.
Clio Barnard, the film’s producer, has interviewed the real people concerned, including Dunbar’s parents, sisters, daughters and friends, to trace lives of desolation, drug addiction and racism, themes eerily mirrored by her plays.