LOVE AND INFORMATION
Te Whaea National Dance and Drama Centre, 11 Hutchison Rd, Newtown, Wellington
08/06/2019 - 20/06/2019
Production Details
Spanning a career of four decades, Caryl Churchill’s dramaturgy continually evolves with every offer. Whereas earlier works such as Top Girls and Cloud Nine bend fantasy and reality to in addressing issues of gender identity and social class, A Number and The Skrikerchillingly presage a dystopian future while Mad Forest and Serious Money respectively deploy catharsis and satire to critique the deep state manifestations of totalitarianism and capitalism. Her oeuvre is as varied as it is important.
Written in 2012, Love and Information is arguably Caryl Churchill’s most human if deliberately obtuse work. Consisting of over 50 independent vignettes, it captures our insatiable quest for the latter. Woven as a puzzling tapestry, these mini‐stories each represent the costs and benefits of an “information age” marked by Twitter, Facebook, and Big Data. While information may afford us immediate gratification and sociocultural influence, its pursuit oftentimes comes at the expense of our imaginations, our empathy, our souls, and yes, our ability to practice ‘love’. The play thus unwraps as a pointillistic critique of how we navigate survival in the digital age; each vignette is a brush stroke, a dab on the canvas, a snapshot constituting Churchill’s tapestry of humanity in the modern world. Thus, its form and function reciprocally integrate to offer a fragmented structure that theatrically echoes our ever‐decreasing attention spans and commensurate disconnection from ourselves, each other, and the present moment. The play’s titular themes – love and information – are a dialectic representing an age in which progress and regression are contradictory bedfellows, with the future of the human condition very much at stake.
Love & Information
Te Whaea Theatre, Te Whaea National Dance and Drama Centre, 11 Hutchison Road, Newtown, Wellington
8 – 20 June 2019
Saturday 8th June – Evening (8:15pm)
Sunday 9th June – Matinée (4pm)
Tuesday 11th June – Evening (8:15pm)
Wednesday 12th June – (6pm)
Thursday 13th June – Evening (8.15pm)
Friday 14th June – Evening (8:15pm)
Saturday 15th June – Evening (6pm)
Sunday 16th June – Matinée (6:15pm)
Tuesday 18th June – Evening (6pm)
Wednesday 19th June – Matinée (12:30pm)
Wednesday 19th June – Evening (8:15pm)
Thursday 20th June – Evening (6pm)
Buy tickets here!
Buy tickets to both shows of the double bill here!
$15 both shows, $10 Adult, $5 for concession tickets
Seating strictly limited.
Advisory: Coarse Language
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Director – Peter Zazzali
Production Manager – Cameron Trigg
Stage Manager – Scott McCready
Technical Manager – Marshall Rankin
Designer (Costume / Set) – Brian King
Designer (Lighting) – Jennifer Lal
Costume – Meredith Dooley
Costume – Jessica Taunt
Set & Props – Jacob Keenan
Costume Supervisor – Kaarin Slevin
Production Supervisor – Michael Leger
SM Tutor – Larissa Marno
Acting Depart Liaison – Mitch Thomas
Assistant Stage Manager – Michael Gibbs
Lighting Operator – Mikayla Heasman
Sound/AV Coördinator – Isaac Kirkwood
CAST
Actor – Myer Van Gosliga
Actor – Rasmus Wessman
Actor – Lance Ainofo
Actor – Robert Johansson
Actor – Richard Crouchley
Actor – Eliis Uudekull
Actor – Eden Wallace
Actor – Lydia Bensky
Actor – Lucy Dawber
Actor – Dani Meldrum
Cello – Olivia Wilding
Theatre ,
A riveting journey through an insightful, thought-provoking and sometimes moving labyrinth of highly varied human interactions
Review by John Smythe 10th Jun 2019
Since Caryl Churchill wrote Love and Information in 2012, the Information Super Highway has become a ubiquitous constant in most of our lives. In the seven years since, it has arguably become more intrusive, more convenient and more indispensable as a resource. We live in an age of constant connectivity and information overload.
Watching Love and Information – presented by Toi Whakaari as part of the 3rd year Acting Double Bill along with Eleanor Bishop’s Boys – is like checking tweets, texts, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Emails while web-browsing, channel-hopping and eavesdropping – and maybe dipping into newspapers, magazines and books as well. In parallel or counterpoint, the play also looks at, and for, that elusive yet essential thing called love in its various forms. But while the above behaviour may suggest boredom and disinterest, Love and Information delivers the opposite.
Directed by Peter Zazzali, with mood-setting punctuation by cellist Olivia Wilding, actors Myer Van Gosliga, Rasmus Wessman, Lance Ainofo, Robert Johansson, Richard Crouchley, Eliis Uudekull, Eden Wallace, Lydia Bensky, Lucy Dawber and Dani Meldrum bring the ‘brief candles’ of 43 vignettes alive over 70 minutes.
Within constantly changing groupings they make every person, relationship and situation real, compelling us to believe in them. Everything is open to interpretation as we intuitively invent what’s happened before and deduce what’s driving each scene while connecting through recognition, empathy or curiosity.
The set, designed by Jacob Keenan, offers a white wall constructed from multiple white plastic dish racks and a range of small rostra easily reconfigured by the cast within the traverse acting space, lit by Jennifer Lal. The costumes, credited to Meredith Dooley and Jessica Taunt, and AV surtitles (Isaac Kirkwood), serve as instant prompts to our understandings and interpretations.
As I understand it the 100-odd characters are neither named nor gendered, and the scenes are grouped within seven sections and may be played in whatever order each production chooses.
From the two schoolgirls negotiating whether or not one will divulge a secret to the other, to the couple where she instantly answers all the quiz questions he pitches at her except one – “Do you love me?” – our journey through this insightful, thought-provoking and sometimes moving labyrinth of highly varied human interactions is riveting.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
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