Return @ Unity Theatre, Liverpool, 12 Jun

First performed at The Yard, London, in 2012, Dina Mousawi's Return is a deeply personal piece that tells the stories of several Iraqi women – their lives and loves under occupation – alongside the narrative of Mousawi's own journey from Bradford back to her childhood home of Baghdad. Joined by three actors, playing by turns Mousawi's mother, her grandmother, some of the women she interviewed during her trip (whose words are delivered verbatim), and soldiers, Mousawi fields a complex, sensitively put together patchwork of experiences – “some funny, some tragic, some really political,” she says – presented both onstage and onscreen.

As well as simply giving these women a platform to tell their versions of events, Mousawi wanted Return to question – and even attempt to counter – their representation in Western media. An actor, she never set out to become a producer, she says, but rather felt impelled to make Return as “I was constantly being faced with the fact that all films about the Middle East were always about men, soldiers or terrorists.” Particularly, she explains, she and the director, Poonam Brah – with whom Mousawi runs the 3Fates theatre company alongside designer Alice Hoult – wanted to zoom in on the real-time, real-term “domestic changes” in women's lives as a result of the UK and US occupation of Iraq; especially the ones we might not imagine.

She recounts one such unique, intimate story of a girl who began chatting online with an American soldier; when her father took her to meet him in the Green Zone, they fell in love. They eloped to Turkey, and now they live in the US, him having left the army and she studying to be a doctor. Another woman told Mousawi of how, because of power outages, “it was really hard on the lovers”; as they couldn't communicate any other way, they would cycle to each other's homes to look up at the windows and check their partners were OK. A third talks of how she would recommend to her daughters, who felt trapped in the house, that they go to the library, “because your imagination can let you escape to anywhere you want.” One of these accounts alone would provide basis enough for a feature-length film; the range and depth of stories in Return, from women of different ages, religions, social backgrounds and circumstances, are what give it its power not only as a dramatic piece, but also as a testament to human strength. [Lauren Strain]