This week an unusual event took place this week in Bradford. St George’s Hall hosted The Dreams I Had: Andrea Dunbar, a production commemorating the Bradford-born playwright Andrea Dunbar. Even with the added publicity of being an official event as part of Bradford’s City of Culture 2025, a full house was surprising. Dunbar died in 1990 at the age of 29, in The Beacon pub on the Buttershaw estate. She left behind a small body of work: three plays and a screenplay.
This relatively small literary legacy offers an invaluable window into working-class northern England in the 1980s. But Dunbar’s modest output has had an outsized influence on contemporary British theatre. Andrea Dunbar may not be a household name, but her work remains an invaluable window into life in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
A life tragically cut short
Dunbar was born in 1961 and grew up on the Brafferton Arbor estate in Bradford. Her first bit of success was in 1980, when she submitted her first play The Arbor to a young writer’s competition at the Royal Court Theatre, London. The Arbor was selected by the theatre as the outstanding piece in the competition. The play was later staged to immediate acclaim.
It was an achievement made all the more remarkable by the fact that Dunbar was 18 when the play was staged, and only 15 when she wrote it. It was submitted on a school textbook in green ink. She already had one child when the play had its opening night. Her next play Rita, Sue and Bob Too was made into a film in 1986. With the exception of a further play, Shirley, which was never performed, that represents the sum total of all of Dunbar’s output before her untimely death from a brain haemorrhage in 1990.
An uncomfortable reflection of reality
Bradford hosting the City of Culture 2025 poses a conundrum which can’t be ignored. In spite of the great efforts and hard work of so many involved in the project, it can be hard to conceal the city’s poverty. I took my seat in the dress circle at St George’s Hall ten minutes before the curtain rose, I was wondering how the production might reflect the neglect that Dunbar wrote about.
“The economy has gone wrong because something has gone wrong spiritually and philosophically” – Margaret Thatcher
Dunbar doesn’t fit the mould of cookie-cutter regional patriot appropriate for a nostalgic evening: she was no sort of John Benjamin of the Buttershaw estate, and she wasn’t any Alan Bennett teddy bear either. Her work can be funny, disturbing, raw, deeply sexual and often uncomfortable. So, I was hoping to see something a bit different.
Minimalist staging hints at the 1980s
Cecil B DeMille once said a good film starts with an earthquake and goes up from there. The Dreams I Had: Andrea Dunbar starts as it means to go on, with the opening scene of Rita, Sue and Bob Too, which is undoubtedly her best-known piece of writing. The staging is sober and austere; actors move around the stage with a small number of chairs, but there were no complex sets or complicated effects, except for a few lighting effects and one or two musical cues to remind us we are in the 1980s.
The effect is that Dunbar’s natural, unvarnished voice comes through without the distraction of ‘look-at-me’ direction. It all works rather nicely. The centrepiece of the evening was complete staging of Dunbar’s third and final play, Shirley, written in 1986.
A rare glimpse of Dunbar’s maturing potential
The play is very rarely staged, and therefore seeing it in its entirety next to earlier scenes from Dunbar’s earlier piece, something unexpected happens. Shirley allows us to contrast how Dunbar portrays the sexuality of a grown woman, in this case the mother character, with the adolescent sexuality of her earlier plays.
This small play, just over 30 minutes long, was Dunbar’s last complete work. As such, it offers a tantalising glimpse of the plays of her maturity. Judging from the production I saw, it isn’t unreasonable to imagine that Dunbar may have gone on to write more plays about the sexuality of women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. Sadly, it was not to be.
Respectful production showcases Dunbar’s unique voice
I don’t have the slightest doubt that the director, Erica Whyman, and the dramaturg, Kat Rose-Martin, have the deepest respect for Dunbar’s work and have put lots of thought and care into the production. I admired the commitment to putting Dunbar’s voice front and centre and using the event as an opportunity to show her off, but I can’t shake off the nagging feeling I had when I left the theatre on Wednesday night.
Dunbar emerged at a time of massive upheavals to British society. There seemed to be very little in the production to reflect this. But one of the nagging thoughts I can’t shake off, is this: not only would Dunbar’s work not be performed today, but it also wouldn’t even be written today. Within traditional modes of cultural production, like publishing, theatre, music and the visual arts, there has been a collapse of curiosity about the real world, as theatres and publishers come under extreme financial pressure.
The decline of working-class representation in the arts
The nadir of this is the once-radical Channel 4 – ground-breaking at the same time Andrea Dunbar broke through – holding up working-class communities to ridicule in programmes like Benefits Street. The atmosphere of lively curiosity which characterised the visual arts in the 1980s, and which Dunbar burst into, was aggressively interested in reality. That seems to have vanished.
Maybe I’m expecting too much. Maybe I’m asking the wrong question. Either way, I left the theatre having laughed more than I expected, but feeling slightly melancholy that the next Andrea Dunbar probably wouldn’t be discovered today, which is a great pity.
