The Arbor – review

Verbatim theatre is a new form of contemporary political drama, in which the proceedings of some hearing or trial are reconstituted word-for-word on stage, acted out by performers. Now artist and film-maker Clio Barnard has experimentally and rather brilliantly applied this technique to the big screen, ventriloquising the past with a new kind of "verbatim cinema". She has journeyed back 30 years with a movie about the late Andrea Dunbar – dramatist and author of Rita, Sue and Bob Too – who, physically weakened by alcoholism, died in 1990 of a brain haemorrhage aged 29.

Dunbar came from that part of Bradford's tough Buttershaw estate known as "the Arbor". Barnard has interviewed Dunbar's family, friends and grownup children and then got actors to lip-synch to the resulting audio soundtrack, talking about their memories. Passages of Dunbar's autobiographical plays are acted out in the open spaces of the very estates where she grew up, surrounded by the (presumably real) residents looking on. The effect is eerie and compelling: it merges the texture of fact and fiction. Her technique produces a hyperreal intensification of the pain in Dunbar's work and in her life, and the tragic story of how this pain was replicated, almost genetically, in the life of her daughter Lorraine, who suffered parental neglect as a child and domestic violence and racism in adult life, taking refuge in drugs in almost the same way that Andrea took refuge in alcohol. The story of Lorraine's own child is almost unbearably sad, and the experience of this child's temporary foster-parents – who were fatefully persuaded to release the child back into Lorraine's care – is very moving.

Dunbar's story, and her success as a teenage playwright in Max Stafford-Clark's Royal Court, challenges a lot of what we assume about gritty realist theatre or literature from the tough north. In many cases, it is produced by men whose gender privileges are reinforced by university, and who have acquired the means and connections to forge a stable career in writing. However grim their plays or novels, there is a kind of unacknowledged, extra-textual optimism: the author, at least, has got out, has made it. Dunbar hadn't got out; she did not have the aspirational infrastructure of upward mobility. In the end, she was left with precisely those problems she depicted. Barnard has created a modernist, compassionate biopic: a tribute to her memory and her embattled community.