Written for Culture Wars
Love and Information sets out to overload. Fifty-one scenes – playlets really – come thick and fast, each firing data our way, until somewhere around the halfway mark, your frazzled brain can take no more. Which is basically a really neat way of saying something bleeding obvious; namely, that the Information Age has bombarded and bamboozled us.
It’s absolutely true, but we live and lament it every single day. It’s impossible not to be aware of it. We’re reminded with every beep of every blackberry, with every YouTube video shared around every pub table, with every empty status update and every time we get distracted by Twitter. Or Tumblr. Or Wikipedia. Or whatever. I’m not convinced we needed Caryl Churchill to tell us as much.
In fairness, she tells us much more besides. Each of those scenes – many of them sculpted with the sort of precision-honed minimalism that only a master could muster – revolves around some notion of knowledge. There are secrets and censuses, fingers itching for laptops and hearts battling with heads, brains that can’t remember, brains that can’t forget and brains that have never known. Churchill has written a crash course in epistemology; only it doesn’t so much feel like you’re learning, as downloading the syllabus over two hours.
In all this, the thread of love weaves in and out, less obviously, but no less present. It’s there in the simple fact of humanity, of human relations. In families sat on sofas gawping at home movies and in two women chuckling over a silly joke. In a man and woman arguing at the gym over his relationship with a computer and in the teenage fans rolling facts about their particular pop idol to prove their dedication.
Form matches content superbly, not only with the onslaught, but also with the introduction of a random scene that disrupts the neat seven by seven structure. Love, to mis-use Gilbert Ryle’s depiction of mind-body dualism, is “the ghost in the machine.”
Yet, at the same time, that form makes the play – or rather plays – somewhat wearying. Just as many look trite and arbitrary, beginning with the sort of punchy, kooky opener one finds in Whose Line Is It Anyway?, while others can come across as clever-clever – a little ‘They don’t know that we know they know we know.’
In between each scene, to add to the decoding demanded, James MacDonald’s production plays a stock sound – a telephone or laptop, birdsong and aeroplanes, snippets of pop music – as the set changes so slickly you marvel. Individual scenes have been carefully thought through, drawing out ambiguity and red herrings, and are never less than carefully played by a strong and dynamic cast, who convey a raft of characters without incessant shapeshifting.
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