The Arbor

When Andrea Dunbar was 15 in 1977, she started work on \i The Arbor\i0 , a play based on her life in a rundown neighborhood of Bradford, in the north of England. Three years later, the play got a successful run in London. Dunbar became famous, wrote several other plays about similar themes - sexual abuse, teen pregnancy, drug addiction, violence - and died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1990. Director and artist Clio Barnard spent two years making sound recordings of the people from Dunbar's circle. But instead of using the material as an inspiration for a normal documentary, she had actors lip synch to the audio, a technique she has employed regularly in her work. Every sigh, gasp and pause in the voices gets articulated impeccably by the actors. The result is an impressive story interspersed with scenes from \i The Arbor\i0 that are acted out by other actors right in Dunbar's neighborhood. Barnard uses the technique to bring documentary and fiction to blows, to show that documentary isn't only the truth, but also a construction. It is the perfect medium for Dunbar's semi-autobiographical texts, in which the boundary between fiction and reality is truly a grey area.