Andrea Dunbar was born in 1961 in Bradford, England. She lived on the Buttershaw council estate with her textile worker parents and seven siblings and attended the local Buttershaw Comprehensive School. At fifteen years old, Andrea was punished for not having arrived prepared for a domestic science lesson, but instead of the prescribed lines, Andea wrote a “witty essay on how baking buns was a middle-class pursuit”. With support from one of her teachers, Andrea went on to write the 1977 play The Arbor, which premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Before her death at only twenty nine years old, Andrea wrote two more plays, Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) and Shirley (1986). “Blunt and unsentimental, Andrea didn’t judge or offer solutions, she just wrote what she knew. And what she knew was life on an estate, as an unmarried teenage mother, in and out of a violent relationship”.
Clio Barnard is an English director, whose debut film The Arbor (2010) tells (some of) the story of Andrea Dunbar and her eldest daughter Lorraine.
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Space Academy, Christchurch, Saint Asaph Street, 371