Natasha Cottriall Archives - thespyinthestalls.com

★★

“Every emotion and incident in this piece is recognisable”

(God Save my) Northern Soul is a single hander, billed as a dark comedy about love, loss and Northern Soul music. The humour rests on an undercooked teenager who suddenly loses her Mum and has to confront the complex world of adulthood. This a very relatable play, with lovely key moments, but as a whole is, like the teenager, rather undercooked.

Natasha Cottriall has written and performs this piece. She has great potential. Her character, Nicole, is the narrator and the prime character, a 19-year-old who is unprepared for the consequences of maternal death. At moments Natasha/Nicole also has to ‘be’ the characters that she interacts with, most frequently, a prudish and opinionated grandma; a boozy but supportive friend; and the priest who will conduct the burial. Cottriall handles the transitions well, introduces echoes and repeats to hold the piece together and is a lively presence on the stage, even if her overall performance has some weak spots.

It is not explicitly stated that this is an autobiographical storyline but it could easily be. It is well written – the straight talk, the moments of inappropriate humour, the northern setting, the casual racism that Nicole encounters, her naivety and acute vulnerability. Every emotion and incident in this piece is recognisable and wrings the heartstrings of the audience, as well as laughs.

But, altogether it is a bit loose, meaning that the humour is undeveloped and resolution does not really come about. Director Hannah Tyrell-Pinder and her team have worked sympathetically with the material but the staging choices might have helped the play tighten up, instead of leaving some of it rambling. The Northern Soul music of the title is nicely used as a ‘character’ and also part of the sound design (Chris James) – but we didn’t really get enough of it to understand its significance. The ‘boxes’ set works hard (Alex Marker, designer), but some of it does not seem to add to the action. The close of the play fumbles and seems strangely ill-timed.

I felt I would like to see this piece re-worked. What it conveys is important for us to know: the abrupt transition that death brings about in any child, even older ones. We are never prepared. Parental death calls into recognition all sorts of other influences in our lives, often hidden until that moment. I also want to know ‘what happens next to Nicole?’. She has shown herself to be a real and loveable person who has just started on her journey. Maybe this is a trilogy in waiting.

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.

(GOD SAVE MY) NORTHERN SOUL

Park Theatre

★★

“Every emotion and incident in this piece is recognisable”

(GOD SAVE MY) NORTHERN SOUL

Park Theatre

Reviewed on 12th September 2025

by Louise Sibley

Photography by Mark Senior

Previously reviewed at this venue:

(GOD SAVE MY) NORTHERN SOUL

(GOD SAVE MY) NORTHERN SOUL

(GOD SAVE MY) NORTHERN SOUL

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:

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