Theatre as pure storytelling doesn’t get much better or more charming than this tale of a mother and daughter living in isolation.
Irene, the mother, spends her time reading and licking stamps. Despite being close-minded and disdainful of the world beyond her four walls, she’s highly imaginative, romantic, and escapist. Anna Bella, her daughter, is bored, lonely, and slightly bratty when attention-starved. She desperately needs something to just happen and so creates Anna Bella Eema from mud who comes to life and silently destabilises their rutted existence.
Irene leads the action and is acted to perfection. In fact, she’s so vivid that she seems at first starkly out of place in the hotel-cum-theatre (there’s a good reason most stages are almost featureless) but once you’re drawn into her rich and complete world, a spooky fairy tale unfolds. The plot evolves smoothly and, although the pace is non-uniform, nothing is hurried or spread too thin.
Anna Bella Eema herself is carefully poised between cute and creepy. She has very much the same role in the real world as in the story world: she has an unaccountable manipulative “otherness”, in our world she’s a living illustration of the prose and in the story world she’s the characters’ bridge into deeper fantasy. Smart and subtle writing.
If you’re going to see something midday, see this. It is proof, if you need it, that American culture does in fact exist.
5/5 
Bernie Greenwood
