Love and Information

Love and Information runs about ninety minutes but has over fifty scenes.  There are seven sections which must be played in order – but the scenes within each section can be played in any order (because there is no cause-and-effect scene to scene).  Plus, there are ‘random’ scenes that may be placed... wherever.  Scenes last from less than a minute to several minutes.  No scene reaches any kind of resolution.  Context – i.e. before and after, cause and consequence - is up to our imaginations. 

There are over a hundred characters, but no character is named or recurs or has a story.  So, each of the cast of eight (in this production) has to play fourteen or fifteen characters – and convince us they are different every time they appear on stage for another encounter.  This cast – Iopu Auva’a, Jane Edwina Seymour, Jack Francis West, Junghwi Jo, Charlie Morris, Felix Star, Emma Woods and Sean Yuen Halley – achieve these things with different walks, voices, demeanours and multiple – and very rapid - costume changes.  What all of them have to achieve - in a second - is a believable character who appears and disappears. They are all therefore quite amazing - all distinctly different, highly talented and expertly cast – four of them are beautiful dancers too.  It’s difficult at first to get the rapid character switches clear.  We tend to think, ‘Oh, here’s that woman again...’  But it’s not that woman again.  It’s another woman in another situation.

Director/choreographer Belle Hansen, always an impressive director, has had to choose the order in which the scenes run, and who plays what – and she pulls it all together with great verve and achieves a rhythm and a pace that never slackens.  If each scene is ‘information’ they could risk overwhelming us – but that’s just like the world we live in.  That’s the point.  Yes, with over fifty scenes, some do fall flat, some are not at all memorable (like skimming a newspaper or a website), many bewilder or frustrate us as much as they bewilder or frustrate the characters.   A woman tries to tell a boy that she is his mother.  What is he to do with that information?  What did the boy believe before?  And now?  A young man falls hopelessly in love with a body-less digital image and cannot be dissuaded...  And then?

Harry Gill’s highly inventive, flexible set design, with rotatable flats that can become a big screen for projections, atop a grassy platform with steps down to the front, is able to suggest rooms, streets, laboratories, beaches and more.  Sidney Younger’s lights render abrupt changes of mood and locale.  Sound designer Jack Burmeister supplies sound for phenomena no one understands, but he also has had the enormous task of providing musical touches for just about all the multiple scenes – and he achieve that with great subtlety, each selection so appropriate that they enhance and never distract.

Whatever Love and Information is, this production is never boring.  The cast’s achievement is awe inspiring even if they have no narrative or ‘psychology’ to energise their moments.  What we carry away is the overall sense of the difficulty of making sense of our world. This idiosyncratic play races along – blackly, ruefully funny as well as evocative, stimulating, painful, insightful and constantly surprising us that there can be so many variations on our struggles with ‘information’.   

Michael Brindley