Love and Information

Daily Review

 The title of this play gives a much need clue to what it is about. I have selected only serious shots from available images but there was a lot of fun in this theatre  too.
The prospectus incited curiosity with its description: "eight chamelionic actors will embody more than 100 roles, through a series of tantalising vignettes. Like a single beam of light refracted, each scene exposes a different facet of the human condition." Well, that is a very fair description of what the veteran playwright of 4 decades Caryl Churchill set up, and the talented crew of actors and sound and light geniuses put us through in 95 minutes of mostly helter skelter run through life (but with an empathic portrayal of encounter with death and mourning), leaving us to ponder, like doing a cryptic crossword at high speed, to find where the connections are to be made. Again from the prospectus,  "..exhaustively mirrors our age of the splintered attention span. (New York Times). " 
One scene I loved was the anthropological museum where the stuffed animals were carried in, and then the human stone age specimens were also put on their plinths and had play as if also part of the taxidermy as those visiting the exhibition carried on with their own agendas.


Herald-Sun
I also liked Lee Bremer's (Australian Stage) take on it : "So there is no linear narrative. No story, as such, but perhaps many micro stories, all involving questions of love and information, more of the latter than the former, I think... The whole thing really is big, jangly, often frenetic, sometimes moody, frequently funny...  prodding us to think about the nature of information...we devour it, we send it, we are it. Literally, we are information, it's there in our DNA. Information can change the way we see a situation or think of a person. Sometimes we don't want to know certain information, or wonder if we would have been better off not knowing it. Some information we keep to ourselves as secrets; and is this better or worse for them (or us)... The stage was stark and white with movable white blocks for props and backlit doorways around the stage through which the actors entered and exited again to make their hasty costume changes. Sometimes all the cast were on stage together, sometimes just an intimate two engaging in no more than an intimate two or three words. Settings were varied – domestic home; the office; a roadworks site; the gym; a psyche consultation room; a garden; a cemetery... "


theage.com.au


Herald Sun