28 February – 1 March
Riham Isaac’s one-woman personal investigation into the meaning of love is brought to the stage with nostalgia, beauty, femininity, and an overwhelming feeling of confusion. We follow Riham in her discovery and journey to both define love subjectively and understand how she personally identifies with love. Ultimately asking the question ‘will we ever know how to love?’
In the intimate setting of Birmingham Repertory’s The Door Theatre, Isaac and her set designer Bashar Hassuneh created a minimal, uncluttered, and purposeful space. All Riham needed was a small television and a framed screen that showed a live feed of a camera she used to focus our attention on her props and expressions. However, the focal point of the set was a large projector screen that filled the back of the stage acting as a moving, interactive backdrop and abstract spectacle.
Another Lover’s Discourse opens with a nostalgic feeling, the television lit up in the darkened theatre showing a black and white old Hollywood film in Arabic, with an English translation projected at the back of the stage. The dual screens, one with the clip of the old movie and one with the subtitles made the audience choose either to enjoy the movie and conceive your own meaning of their conversation, or to read the translation and understand these characters’ opinion of love and marriage from another country and another time. Riham starts her story here, as these films are what first introduced her to the subject of love at an early age, a Hollywood depiction of femininity, masculinity and how they fall in love.
The projector screen upstage almost acted as another character, with Riham occasionally engaging with the pre-recorded dances, mimicking them in both change of costume and dance. By making the performance feel deeper than just the stage, the screens allowed us to be absorbed in a sensory circus to overwhelm and confuse. Riham is overwhelmed by love and has not yet found her personal meaning, that was certainly conveyed in her abstract and deeply thoughtful performance.
Riham Isaac’s creative abilities spread from her multimedia approach to theatre to her beautiful singing voice. It was a pleasure to hear two songs performed in Arabic. Although their contents may be lost to a non-Arabic speaker, the feeling of romance and desire penetrated through Riham’s talent and engagement with her audience. The play overall did not contain very much dialogue; almost all dialogue was from pre-recorded videos played on either of the two screens, most of which were spoken in Arabic. The parts of the recordings that were translated in subtitles did give a more literal meaning of Isaac’s exploration of love, but even when not translated to an English speaker the meaning of those words were open to interpretation.
With moments that will make you laugh and ponder your own understanding of the word love you are left with Riham’s message, that love has no definitive meaning or outcome, it is an adventure rather than a step-by-step checklist ending in marriage. Riham concluded her journey with her ‘manifesto,’ for the first time she broke the fourth wall and extended her own personal questions and struggles to her audience, a thoughtful and passionate ending to a woman’s expression of her voyage to understand love.
★★★☆☆ Scarlett Loveless, 2nd March, 2023
