Love Steps – Omnibus Theatre, London

Love Steps is the lyrical, inspiring playwriting debut from Anastasia Osei-Kuffour. Through words, movement and music it explores the steps to finding, and keeping, love.

Love Steps

I feel like I’m rather getting into choreopoems at this stage. We’ve seen a couple before on the blog. The original one was for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. It’s a genre that breaks with Western theatrical strictures to blend poetry, music, movement and song. And it is the form that Anastasia Osei-Kuffour has used as inspiration for her playwriting debut, Love Steps.

This isn’t our first time encountering Osei-Kuffour, either. We’ve previously seen her in a directorial capacity. For her writing debut she creates a character, Anna (Sharon Rose) who shares many qualities with herself: for a start Anna is young, gifted and Black. Through Anna, Osei-Kuffour plays out the pressures women face to have it all. To fulfil their potential, but also to find love. Specifically to find love in time to start a family. For Black women doing all this in Britain (or other Western countries), having to weed out potential partners who exoticise or objectify them adds extra weight to an already heavy task.

The choreopoem-inspired format of Love Steps consists mainly of poetry and dance. Anna takes a series of steps as she progresses from dreaming of her perfect man, to seeking him out, to thinking she’s found him, to the aftermath. She speaks to the audience mostly in verse, and often as if she’s talking to a mirror. She’s joined on stage by Reece Richards, who plays the other characters: love interests, but also Anna’s parents, friends, and fellow church-goers. Balanced with the poetic writing are sequences of movement (movement direction and choreography by Leroy ‘FX’ Dias Dos Santos) which fill in the rest of the story. Richards and Rose move together or drift apart in line with the story, supplementing, underscoring and bringing to life the words.

Women: You Can Have it All!

As a person sharing at least some overlap with the qualities of Osei-Kuffour’s character, I appreciated the work’s ambiguity. Having it all does feel impossible sometimes, and figuring out what you want can be difficult. Should love come to us, or should we seek it out? Whose advice do we listen to when vetting partners or navigating relationships? And, ultimately, are we part of a future whole, or whole within ourselves? Very philosophical questions, with a biologically-imposed timeframe in which to figure them out.

Rose and Richards tease out these themes, questions and ambiguities with skill. They have great chemistry, and I was particularly impressed by Rose’s ability to respond differently to Richards in each different character he embodies. The multiplicity and lyricism of Love Steps has the potential to become confusing, but in this team’s hands the story unfolds clearly. And I include here the creative team. The lighting by Benny Goodman, along with AV by Abu Mensah, basically is the set: it fills in spaces, creates moods, wraps the characters in the blush of new love, and isolates them as cracks appear. Sound design by Duramaney Kamara fills in more of their world: apps, clubs, and church for starters. And Osei-Kuffour is in the director’s chair, bringing the production together with a gentle touch.

Love Steps treads the line between realism and optimism, heartbreak and hope. As a first step into playwriting for Osei-Kuffour it feels simple yet assured. It’s on at Clapham’s Omnibus Theatre until 20 April – whether you are on your own journey to love or think it’s about time you tried a choreopoem for yourself, it’s a good pick.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

Love Steps on until 20 April 2024. More info and tickets here.