CONTEXT

                         Love and Information

                                        by Caryl Churchill

                PRESENTATION

         Caryl Churchill was born on 3rd September 1938 in London and she is 80 years old at this moment. Her plays' subjects are about dealing with feminist issues, the abuses of power and sexual politics.

         Her family immigrated to Canada when she was 10 and she attended Lady Margaret Hall, a women's college of the University of Oxford, but remained in England after receiving a B.A. in 1960. Her three earliest plays, ''Downstairs'' (produced in 1958), ''Having a wonderful time'' (produced in 1960) and ''Easy Death'' (produced in 1962) were performed by Oxford based theatrical ensembles.

        During 1960s and ‘70s, Churchill wrote radio dramas and then television plays for the British television. while being a resident dramatist at London’s Royal Court Theatre, Churchill wrote ''Objections to Sex and Violence" (1974), which was not well-reviewed, but it led to her successful association with David Hare and Max Stafford-Clark’s Joint Stock Company and with Monstrous Regiment, a feminist group. "Cloud 9" (1979), with the main subject - sexual politics, was successful in the United States as well as in Britain, winning an Obie Award in 1982 for play writing. The next year ''Top Girls" (1982) brought her another Obie; it is a play that deals with women losing their humanity in order to attain power in a male-dominated environment.

       Caryl Churchill is known for her unconventional theatrical writing, e.g. ''Love and Information'' is an episodic play and while she is criticized by others, many appreciate her original way of writing a play.

       The play has no named characters, it is a series of unnamed voices circling around the central preoccupation. The audience is free to draw conclusions about the meaning of the connections or disconnection between the scenes. This play, particularly, is built up in a way that gives freedom for the audience and for the actor to interpret its meanings. There is a lack of indications for the actor, leaving them alone with their own thoughts and opinions, which is frightening. It is like the space in a therapist's room, where you encounter your own thinking and feeling. There is always darkness in Churchill's work.' - Digital Theatre

       Churchill examines, explores, celebrates and questions where we are in our contemporary society. Her focus is on how the information that makes us human beings; our feelings, dreams and minds, are negotiated in a world dominated by a different kind of information. How does this affect our relationships? How does it affect our memories? But rather than giving us an answer or presenting a moral tale, Churchill offers us short scenarios of us, existing, loving and figuring, and it is up to us to decide what we make of it.  The play is a compilation of seven sections each with a number of scenes that range from less than a minute in lengths to a few minutes long. The seven sections of the play must be done in order, however the scene within each section can be done in whatever order the director wishes. The ''random'' section of scenes, included at the end of the play are able to be incorporated anywhere within the play. This allows the director ample freedom to play with the story line of the play along with the certain themes and questions they want to highlight with their particular production.

      Throughout her writing life Churchill has experimented with form and process. "What is a Caryl Churchill play?" seems to be a question hard to answer. Churchill is a playwright that seemed to be constantly reinventing the idea of what a play should be.
       In the scene "Lab", it is described in unemotional scientific jargon the process of slicing a chick's brain in order to understand the pecking mechanism. This scene makes you wonder – what is information without love? Is it a madness like the obsessive fan in "Fan" where the need to know everything, disguised as love, is a different threaten?
        This mysterious, powerful play is like a disquisition on two of the most powerful poles in our lives: needing to know and needing to love. 

       Caryl Churchill's career is unmatched in contemporary theatre and she is considered to be one of the greatest.

Interview with Love and Information’s Assistant Director, Caitlin McLeod 

When you first read Love and Information, what was your immediate response to it? 

           'I felt it was such it was such a pertinent state of the nation play written by Caryl Churchill, one of our greatest leading playwrights. I guess it’s also a state of the world play, but seen through a mainly British lens. I thought these vignettes summed up where we were in time, in a technological sense and in a relationship sense – it’s where we’ve come to. And it was so far reaching and ranging that it felt like it was something that everyone could relate to or at least have imaged themselves in that situation or know people in that situation. It felt like there was a way in for everyone, it was one of those plays that I felt, for anyone who read it, there would be an instant reaction of recognition and enjoyment from each of those little scenes. And of course I was struck by Carol’s language which has become even more pared down from the days of plays like The Striker. There’s now no punctuation, pauses or character indications. Her simple, sparse and poetic style leaves such room for interpretation and meaning. There’s so much meaning in such few words, which I think is definitely unique to her craft. The form is really unique, isn’t it? Love and Information has been described as a kind of kaleidoscope in term of structure. '

Would you agree with that? 

              'There are different levels of structure, so you have the overall play that was then divided into seven sections and each of those sections has a collection of about seven different scenes which have a distinct theme. So one of them is difficult information, one of them is looking for meaning, one of them is memory. In those you can then have 3 page scenes, or you have 5 second scenes. And within these scenes, it doesn’t say who these voices are or how many people are in the scene. What the feelings are, what the relationships are, that is all up for grabs with the other artists. 

When you read the play on the page, those sections are numbered and each scene is also tilted. How did you try to convey those titles to the audience? 

                'We did a workshop a couple months before we started the play and there was a lot of talk about whether we needed the titles at the beginning of each scene, because some of them are quite specific and you wouldn’t necessarily know what the scene was about just from hearing it. I think everyone felt quite strongly that we could feel that were different sections and also when you were moving from one to the next because they were each saying something different about information or love. But generally, as we’ve rehearsed it and come to create the world of each scene, it has become quite clear that if you put too much meaning on top of it or try to signal too strongly that this is what it’s about, then it takes away from the possibilities of the scene. So I think they decided it wasn’t necessary that the audience knew, for instance, that a scene was about Census. It was more important that they have a sense that this scene is about people avoiding information or about people avoiding giving information. That’s more interesting than knowing what the scene is called. 

Can you say a little bit about the play’s title Love and Information? How did the name of the play feed into the rehearsal process? 

                   'There was a lot of discussion about where the information is in each scene and where is the love and how that is negotiated and changed. What was important to find out was what the relationships or what the love could be in each scene and every time that we pushed that, the scene inherently became more interesting and more powerful. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, love and information. 

What do you think Caryl Churchill might be saying about the relationship between these two ideas?

                    'I think she is investigating the point that we are at now in terms of our natural impulses, which are love and feelings, existing within our man-made technological world which is a lot to do with information and how to process that. Today’s information, Internet, Facebook, etc - are they used to channel love, are they now different ways to express love? So, I think she was interested in investigating, exploring different types of love that have come out of this new world of information. She’s not necessarily saying this is bad or this should change, or that we are in a worse place then we were when we had love without Facebook or any of these other things. I think she is really interested in the strange place we have ended up and how we negotiate love within information which is overpowering us every minute of the day, really.