LOVE STEPS
Image credit — Steve Gregson
Love Steps by Anastasia Osei-Kuffour
Anastasia Osei-Kuffour's semi-autobiographical debut is a story of inner resilience, and finding a path to inner healing.
The journey to true love seldom runs smoothly, even when you seem to be doing all the right things and following all the “rules”. This is the plight of Love Step’s protagonist Anna played by Sharon Rose. The play is an eclectic brew of poetic verse, dance and music, with Sharon Rose passionately delivering glittery prose that is both earnest and endearing.
Reece Richards takes on the many other characters in the story embodying the enduring love of her father, the pity, prayers and pressure of her church elders and every attempt Anna makes to find the love of her life. Like a refrain, during the scenes depicting Anna’s train of thought, he looms in the background as her “future one” lying somewhat impatiently for her to find him.
The play begins with Anna reciting an extremely vulnerable poetic verse, detailing her desire for a romantic love that seems to pervade her. We’re then introduced to Anna’s world. She is a 34-year-old Christian woman with a successful career and a loving community but desires marriage. Her friends, single and coupled, encourage her to broaden her pools as she might be blocking her blessings.
Movement delineates the plot of Love Steps. We see Richards and Rose move sometimes in perfect harmony with each other, in moments for example when Anna ends up falling deeply for a new man in her life not realising that the depth of his feelings for her are purely platonic. At other times it’s disjointed movements, demonstrating that the characters are out of sync.
Anna ventures into the dark and murky worlds of online dating. This segment of the play is ingenious; Osei-Kuffours’s wit and Richards’s delivery has the audience in hysterics as Anna wades through the trenches of the dreaded “apps”.
There are some darker moments as well. For example, when Anna contemplates the worthiness of her skin against her desire to be loved and gives a voice to the hidden anxieties many women feel about wanting a romantic relationship.
The play’s soundtrack ranges from soothing, to vibrant to evocative, matching Anna’s pace as she shifts from each stage of her love life. The set is completely stripped back. A black canvas hangs in the back, and singular words, representative of the season that Anna is in are projected onto it during the play. Rose and Richards are both dressed in simple black outfits, as they too are blank canvases for the story. When Anna falls in love, she dons a wrap-around dress, an intense pink, and the stage is lit in a matching vibrant hue.
When this dream love she has so tightly wrapped herself in falls apart, the stage fades into a deep, icy blue, and eventually black as Anna has to pick herself up again and heal from a pain she didn’t see coming.
In the final scenes we’re inspired by Anna’s radical acceptance of herself and the reality of her love life. She’s hurt by how things have transpired but embraces it, knowing that she is deserving of love and is still hopeful that she will find it.
Love Steps is a play that will resonate with many women. It deals with themes such as romantic love, black female identity, loneliness and faith, and addresses the question of whether or not women can have it all. It follows a very similar vein to Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s novel Yinka Where Is Your Huzband?” The play does occasionally feed into several cliches namely to do with black women’s relationships to desirability. Additionally, whilst written beautifully, the poetry at times was quite dense which sometimes made it hard to follow.
Overall, Osei-Kuffour writes and directs a stunning play that allows both performers to impress with their bodies and ability to capture the audience. It is vulnerable, relatable, and incredibly warm.
By Melody Adebisi
★★★☆☆
Love Steps is showing Omnibus Theatre until 20 April.