Reviewed by Jack Bengough
A Love Letter to the Nightingale is the latest production to grace the Blue Room stage as a part of it’s 2024 season. Coming from lead artist/ director Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson, along with a team of multi-disciplinary artists, the production takes the form of a multi-media experience that utilizes traditional elements of theatre production as well as filmic elements to tell it’s story. While adopting these filmic elements led to a uniqe form of storytelling for this production that was at times engaging and moving, they were also perhaps lent on too much, leading to the productions more theatrical elements being overly neglected.
The production opens with a man, Rage (Danny Aghaie) performing a series of clapping pushups before lighting a herbal cigarette and beginning to speak. The stage is setup in a traverse, with a circular projection screen hanging above centre stage. When Rage speaks, the language is highly poetic but coming from a voice that seems emotionally distraught. Rage is later joined by his counterpart, Reason (Ashkaan Hadi) whos words are also poetic but from a voice almsot uncomfortably calm. These two characters represent two halves of the titular Nightingale, as she deals with the vast emotional pain of her recent experiences which at first aren’t entirely clear to the audience.
This argumentative dialogue between two men who are themselves representative of a woman split in two is enhanced by the afformentioned multi-media elements of the production. The circular projector that hangs over centre stage depicts various images such as stained glass windows and motes of light shining across dim skies and these images are in turn enhanced by the lighting (designed by Matthew Erren) which compliments these visuals and extends them beyond the projector screens edges. We also break away at times from the action on stage to pre-recorded montage that takes place on the screen, as performers Misha Noori, Asha Kiani and Vafa Kiani join the cast as they dance, fight, and embrace each other in these cutaway scenes, all aluding to the Nightingales recently unfolded tragedy. In addition to this expansion of the visual medium we are also greeted to a soundscape (designed by Ashton Namdar) that further lends to the dreamlike quality of this whole experience. While prehaps a more minor addition compared to these others, the use of herbal cigarette smoke also fills the room early on into the production, adding an olfactory layer to this highly sernsory experience.
A Love Letter to the Nightingale takes some very big swings as it pushes the boundaries of traditional theatre, adding these multi-media elements into the mix which at times created a very unique and engaging experience. Unfortunately this reviewer feels that the production leans to hard into these elements, as after about twenty minutes of performance, the two lead actors vacate the stage, and a majority of the production is taken up by storytelling that plays out entirely on the projector screen, mainly through text that tells the story of the Nightingales’ recent tragedy. This sequence runs well over half an hour and while some of the afformentioned impressive production elements are still present, it is absent of the accompanying live performance and unfortunately unsucessful in delivering it’s emotionaly charged narrative in a befitting manor. Following this sequence, the actors return to conclude the story, and all the elements missing from that sequence return with them, ending the production on a strong note.
A Love Letter to the Nightingale is a very strong outing for a team willing to push the boundaries of what is expected when watching theatre, however these more experimental elements don’t always manage to be as effective when they no longer lean on the live performance aspects that the medium is most known for. The show will run until the 26th of October at The Blue Room Theatre.
Reviewer Note: Tickets for this review were provided by the theatre company.
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