“the writing itself is strong, as are the performances, but it just misses the mark in its conclusion”
Having been met with great acclaim in the 2017 Edinburgh International Festival, Meet Me At Dawn, as directed by Murat Daltaban, comes to the Arcola for its London premiere.
Helen (Jessica Hardwick) and Robyn (Marianne Oldham) find themselves washed up on shore after their boat capsizes. They’re struggling to locate themselves, working out how to get help, how to go home. But as the adrenaline from their accident starts to wear off, they realise that their surroundings are a little off; that all is not as it seems or as it should be.
Attempting to tackle the inescapable trauma of grief, writer Zinnie Harris takes her inspiration from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It doesn’t quite come together in the same way, but you can see how her efforts have led to her writing Meet Me At Dawn.
Hardwick and Oldham seem to have a genuine affection for one another; there’s a sense of years of intimacy in their performances. The dialogue is quippy and honest, combining practical, familiar chat with surreal memories and poetic contemplation.
A shining black floor and background of changing block colours (designed by director Murat Daltaban, and Cen Yilmazer) add to the sense of unrealness. Abstract piano music and an echo on the dialogue (Oğuz Kaplangi) slip in and out of use, presumably to pinpoint certain poignant moments, but it’s a little random. It’s not that their use is inappropriate to the atmosphere, but rather they don’t appear to mark anything in particular, as the dialogue itself muddles abstraction with pragmatism throughout.
In her programme note, Harris talks about the idea of someone grief-stricken wishing for just a moment longer, and the application of that being a nightmare in reality. But she seems unable to resist a little over-sentimentality in her dealing with this idea. It’s a shame because the writing itself is strong, as are the performances, but it just misses the mark in its conclusion. Meet Me At Dawn poses some interesting questions, but its answers don’t quite satisfy.
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.
