Anna Lewis Archives - thespyinthestalls.com

★★★★

“The subject matter never quite chills our bones, but the context is often unsettling”

The atmosphere hits you like a bracing offshore wind as you descend into the depths of the small basement on Jermyn Street. Anna Lewis’ set: a semi-submerged, semi-derelict stone chapel, creates the mood. Tragic and sepulchral, yet some sort of haven from the cruel elements that sweep the remote Hebridean shoreline outside. Its owner, Kirk, is just as rough-edged. Living alone with Ellen, his niece, they live in quiet captivity until two young, hapless ornithologists burst through the door – literally knocking it off its hinges. The impulsive, emotionally detached Robert, along with the more moral but anxious John have arrived to study the local bird life. It is the eve of World War II, so there is understandably a more sinister motive behind the survey that leaves them stranded on the isle for a month. Less understandable is the fact that the two young men seem somewhat unaware of the pretext. Whereas the isolated, cantankerous Kirk has all the gen. Fully aware that his outlying outcrop is scheduled to be the subject of a biological weapon experiment, he sees the dollar-signs stockpiling in his compensation package.

David Greig’s lyrical play draws you in to this small world. It is claustrophobic but the confines are torn, allowing us to see the wider issues. Little, though, is made of the encroaching anthrax experiment and instead we are watching the social and romantic entanglements as avidly as birdwatchers study our feathered friends’ behaviour. Humans are much more complicated. Greig knows this only too well and the poetry of his language teases out the characters’ serpentine layers with rich dialogue and haunting monologues. The standout performance is Whitney Kehinde’s Ellen. Timid and repressed she swiftly replaces her dour mantle with swathes of lust, as a new-found freedom from her uncle’s tyranny is tragically chanced upon. Kevin McMonagle is wonderfully charismatic as Kirk. Acerbic and unashamedly direct, he tries to keep Ellen like a caged bird but cannot control her mind. The stage lights up every time McMonagle fires his lines with a wry sense of humour and a Chekhovian dramatic irony.

Bruce Langley and Fred Woodley Evans, as Robert and John respectively, also manage to spin out the humour that runs alongside the poignancy. Deliberate echoes of Laurel and Hardy break the solemnity in a play that is difficult to categorise. The comedy is subtle, like the Mona Lisa smile. It disappears when you look directly at it. The ambiguity is sometimes overdone, though, and confusion starts to set in as the show coasts towards its climax in a tangle of charged eroticism. Despite the shifts in mood, Jessica Lazar’s assured direction evenly paces the action. Clever use of the intimate space sets clear indicators for the interior and exterior scenes, enhanced by David Doyle’s suggestive lighting which evokes the bleakness, and ignites warmth when needed. The subject matter never quite chills our bones, but the context is often unsettling.

Politically and philosophically the play throws up some interesting questions while rooting itself in a story about human relationships. Desire is a complex beast. The male characters are more at sea than Ellen. We wonder whether she is playing the two outsiders or whether her passions are genuine. We are certainly given time to contemplate – the play does stretch itself out. Not every character makes it to the end. But, thanks to the writing and the wonderful performances from the strong quartet of actors, the audience is kept in thrall right up to the closing moments.

Anna Bella Eema

Arcola Theatre

Reviewed – 16th September 2019

★★★

“has a constant freshness and fascination“

Receiving its UK premiere at the Arcola Theatre, Pulitzer Prize finalist Lisa D’Amour’s spoken and sung Anna Bella Eema is an incredible piece of storytelling that leaves you open-mouthed – sometimes with wonder and often with mystification.

D’Amour has reworked the play since its 2001 first appearance in Texas and Jessica Lazar’s direction gleefully embraces the curiosity of a wild play that is probably undefinable. But even if we are not always entirely certain of what is going on, the production itself is magnificently polished with three central performances to make you sit up and take notice.

Anna Bella Eema is described as a ghost story for three bodies with three voices. If trying to pin a label on such an eccentric and esoteric work is even worth doing, the nearest one might manage is that it’s a feminist post-modern Samuel Beckett, though even he might have balked at including werewolves, talking foxes, traffic inspectors and a girl made out of mud in the same play.

The audience arrives to discover the three performers (identified only as One, Two and Three in the text) seated on three chairs on a solid rectangle that could define the area of the trailer in which they live or might represent something altogether more earthy and basic. The small set (Anna Lewis) is packed with personal belongings and other items that are sometimes struck or shaken to produce dynamic sound effects.

The performers rarely move from these chairs but colourfully narrate the story of an agoraphobic mum and her sassy ten-year-old daughter who are the only residents of a trailer park which is due to be demolished in favour of a new highway. Perhaps in a bid to ward off the approaching evil the young girl creates a mud girl, or golem, who becomes a friend, an alter-ego and a representation of creative indocility.

The result is a production with hypnotic intensity that doesn’t always work or strike home in the way it should (the fault of the play itself as much as anything), but which has a constant freshness and fascination.

As the young mother who has become a recluse in her trailer, almost oblivious to the world outside, Beverly Rudd is a commanding figure. Unpredictable and ferocious, yet delicate, her Irene/One speaks as easily about being visited by a werewolf as she does seeing a social worker. We sense that the world she inhabits (as trapped in her home as Nell is in her dustbin in Beckett’s Endgame) is often beyond her comprehension and everything she says and does is a deluded retreat from reality.

Equally compelling is Gabrielle Brooks as the precocious and imaginative daughter Anna Bella/Two, a lively and cheeky portrayal of a young girl on her own voyage of discovery, especially during a five-day coma. Brooks shows us a girl as eager to escape the confines of her existence as her mother is to be imprisoned by it.

Natasha Cottriall’s Anna Bella Eema/Three has an air of the mythic but also a down to earth impertinence that reflects the dreams of her “creator” as she changes the lives of the people around her forever.

Music and sound designer Tom Foskett-Barnes is the unseen fourth performer, as a scintillating soundscape is produced in music and effects which are as important to the narrative as the lines themselves.

In some ways this is an inscrutable coming of age story, in others the theme is broader (the invasion of the all-American dream, shades of last year’s film The Florida Project), with all three females being aspects of each other, with a keen desire to fight the unrelenting destructive tide of progress.

Anna Bella Eema’s otherworldly and magical perspectives in this Atticist and Ellie Keel co-production with the Arcola may often lead to bewilderment, but even in the confusion this is American Gothic with a touch of the outlandish, poetic and profound.

OUTLYING ISLANDS

Jermyn Street Theatre

★★★★

“The subject matter never quite chills our bones, but the context is often unsettling”

OUTLYING ISLANDS

Jermyn Street Theatre

Reviewed on 11th February 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Alex Brenner

Previously reviewed at this venue:

OUTLYING ISLANDS

OUTLYING ISLANDS

OUTLYING ISLANDS

Arcola Theatre

Reviewed – 16th September 2019

★★★

“has a constant freshness and fascination“

Receiving its UK premiere at the Arcola Theatre, Pulitzer Prize finalist Lisa D’Amour’s spoken and sung Anna Bella Eema is an incredible piece of storytelling that leaves you open-mouthed – sometimes with wonder and often with mystification.

The result is a production with hypnotic intensity that doesn’t always work or strike home in the way it should (the fault of the play itself as much as anything), but which has a constant freshness and fascination.

Natasha Cottriall’s Anna Bella Eema/Three has an air of the mythic but also a down to earth impertinence that reflects the dreams of her “creator” as she changes the lives of the people around her forever.

Music and sound designer Tom Foskett-Barnes is the unseen fourth performer, as a scintillating soundscape is produced in music and effects which are as important to the narrative as the lines themselves.

Anna Bella Eema’s otherworldly and magical perspectives in this Atticist and Ellie Keel co-production with the Arcola may often lead to bewilderment, but even in the confusion this is American Gothic with a touch of the outlandish, poetic and profound.

Reviewed by David Guest

Photography by Holly Revell

Anna Bella Eema

Arcola Theatre until 12th October

Previously reviewed at this venue: