Love and Information - Malthouse

Overview

Director Kip Williams has turned out an impressive, stylish Australian premiere of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information at the Malthouse. Churchill’s 45th play is a fractured meditation on knowledge, relationships and identity that takes place over 60+ scenes. She gives some guidance as to how acts and sequences within the script are ordered, but within that framework creatives tackling the work have more or less carte blanche.

With so many scenes on show, Paul Jackson’s lighting design takes on an important role in delineating the work’s many transitions. This, in combination with sound design by THE SWEATS — a combination of mostly original score and music by bands like Hot Chip — might initially come across as a over-convenient solution, but as the play progresses, it’s these elements of design which provide a constant spine to these disparate scenes. They impart a sense of coherency that encourages an audience to look at the bigger picture, and at the themes emerging in the gaps between scenes themselves.

The content in these sometimes very brief exchanges is often explicitly geared towards a discussion of the nature and importance of memory, uncertainty and knowledge. As the action progresses, things begin to get more serious — references to terrorism, war in Tripoli, a young schizophrenic who has stopped taking his pills because “they make it hard to get the information”. One stunning scene is as good as theatre gets, with a patient suffering Alzheimer's playing the piano joined in harmony by his two nurses.

Although it’s easy to look for the contemporary cues that might have spurred on the writer’s interest in this material — namely the impact of digital technology upon our ability to relate to one another and ourselves — even when engaging with notions of virtual life, Churchill seems to be speaking to a much deeper and timeless question of connection: what is taking place in any exchange between human beings? What part of ourselves is being lost, or found?

The large ensemble cast is flawless, with Marco Chiappi, Harry Greenwood, Glenn Hazeldine, Anita Hegh, Zahra Newman, Anthony Taufa, Alison Whyte and Ursula Yovich making the play’s many set, character and costume changes look effortless. The play is a co-production with the Sydney Theatre Company; Melbourne audiences should book in now before it heads up the coast.

Image by Pia Johnson.