The Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Caryl Churchill’s Love And Information is the perfect fit for a Sydney theatrical culture in which the director is considered at least partial auteur. That spirit of collaboration verging on dual authorship is built into the DNA of Churchill’s text, which is made up of lines assigned to nobody in particular.
Churchill doesn’t specify gender, either, or even how many characters there are. Productions of this play in London and New York featured twice as many actors as Kip Williams’ production at Wharf 1, which has eight – Glenn Hazeldine, Anita Heigh, Marco Chiappi, Anthony Taufa, Alison Whyte, Ursula Yovich, Harry Greenwood, Zahra Newman – playing multiple roles at lightning speed. Churchill has written seven ‘sections’ featuring seven scenes each, plus some extra scenes without category. Each section must run in a specified order but the scenes within each can run in any order the director wishes.
None of this background is evident, of course, to an audience watching the play itself, which makes finding meaning in its unconventional, create-your-own-adventure form on the page more than a little misleading. This iteration of Love And Information feels formless but satisfyingly cohesive, one in which design, lighting and music are unusually central in attaching meaning to the words themselves. David Fleischer’s set is stark but fluid: a white, flat space on which rectangular blocks are regularly repositioned by the cast to create what context there is for each scene. These transitions are highly choreographed, almost dance-like; bolstered by the propulsive, haunting score by The Sweats, which intensifies between scenes as the performers shuttle themselves on and off the stage at a rate of knots.
The scenes themselves last no more than a few minutes, and some are as short as a few seconds. This is the closest we’ll ever get to Roy Andersson onstage – short vignettes (interestingly, both Love And Information and Andersson’s latest film, A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence, illustrate the ridiculousness of modern life with tableaus of people gawking at stuffed exhibits in museums), which are often individually hilarious but taken together somehow amount to something haunting.
The whole thing peters out – there’s no traditional sense of a climax – but the absence of anything traditional is what makes Churchill’s work, and this fine interpretation of it, so arresting.
4/5 stars
Love And Information is playing at Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company until Saturday August 15.
