Speaking for herself: Andrea Dunbar and Bradford on film

In October 2010, the radio broadcaster Philip Dodd interviewed Clio Barnard about her new documentary, The Arbor (2010), based on the life of the late playwright Andrea Dunbar. As part of the film-making process, Barnard recorded audio interviews with Dunbar’s family then hired professional actors to lip-synch the responses in the film. Dodd had a major problem with this method: The Arbor is rooted in the lives of working-class Northern women, yet for Dodd, ‘they’re not good enough to be seen’. In a passionate defence, Barnard argued ‘I wanted people to speak for themselves’. This article examines Barnard’s film in conjunction with Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, for which Dunbar wrote the screenplay. A paradox is considered, where the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ female voices of Dunbar, her family and neighbours are then mediated by cinematic form; this is placed within a wider argument about how issues around realism and representation in documentary and fiction film contribute to our understanding of the North in popular culture. The analysis then situates this thinking in terms of the representation of Northern writers and spaces, considering how the site-specific locations of writers affect the kind of cultural texts that they are able to produce.