“More
than a hundred characters try to make sense of what they know” is how
the Royal Court describes Caryl Churchill’s latest work. It is joined
at the Court in a couple of weeks by an unrelated 30-minute piece,
Ding Dong The Wicked, suggesting
that, 40 years on from her Sloane Square début, the 74-year-old
playwright is in a prolific phase. For
Love And Information is not so much
one play as 58 playlets, grouped into seven sections plus a coda and
arbitrarily ordered within each section. All but a few of the scenes
are two-handers, played out in a white tiled cube of a set; the cast of
16 includes names such as Nikki Amuka-Bird, Justin Salinger, Linda
Bassett, Amanda Drew, Paul Jesson and Rhashan Stone. James Macdonald’s
production lasts 110 minutes in all, without an interval. As for what
happens…
People speak. People listen. People respond. Or sometimes they don’t.
They speak principally about personal matters (it was 80 minutes in
that I first noticed a Big Issue of the kind that Churchill often
addresses more directly): memories, infidelities, secrets, dreams,
banalities, mnemonic techniques… pretty much all human life is here, in
terms of content, of relationships between characters, and of the
nature of the responses.
Is Churchill making a comment about the volume of
stuff we are routinely called upon
to process nowadays? Quite possibly, but there is no palpable Authorial
Position being taken; the evening is illustrative rather than
argumentative. However, each section includes a “Depression” scene
whose text consists of a single incomplete line; taken together they
show beautifully the reality of the condition itself and the various
ways in which others react to sufferers. Perhaps Churchill is implying
that depression is a natural response to contemporary information
overload, but she clearly understands the
what and the
how of it regardless of the
why.
One cybernetic definition of information is the amount of
unpredictability in a message; in that sense, a jukebox musical or a
Whitehall farce, say, carries virtually no information, but no more
does a piece by Samuel Beckett or Howard Barker. Churchill’s
assemblage, by contrast, covers so much ground so swiftly that, even
though the play’s words themselves bear little coherent information,
its demonstration to us of how we live, think and feel today is
intensively informative.
Written for the Financial
Times.