Anna Bella Eema @ Arcola theatre: Review

Lisa D’Amour’s fantastical and surreal play is set in a trailer home in a deserted trailer park that is about to be demolished to make way for a highway. It leaves the audience guessing what is real and what is part of the imaginations of the main characters. The intimacy of the small theatre at Arcola makes for quite an immersive experience.

Three women are already seated at their TV trays as the audience files in. We meet Irene, a 25-year-old eccentric mother (played by Beverley Rudd) and Annabella her ten-year-old daughter (played by Gabrielle Brooks). Irene refuses to leave the trailer. She makes her money from licking stamps and immerses herself in her many books to pass the time.

Her Daughter Annabella creates a girl Anna Bella Eema (played by Natasha Cottriall) moulded from spit, sweat, blood, and mud out of boredom.

This high energy play is full of fantastical dialogue interspersed by the trio singing ‘a cappella’ and making all the sound effects with simple props. Natasha Cottriall plays the voices of the social worker, the sympathetic policeman and members of the construction crew.

We ask the question of what is “real” and what is imagined.

While this play is entertaining and humorous in parts, it raises more serious issues about vulnerable people that are sidelined and misunderstood in the pursuit of profit and greed and sometimes with devastating consequences.

Anna Bella Eema by Lisa D’Amour is at Arcola Theatre London from 11 September – 12 October 2019

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