Minetta Lane Theatre, New York, February 9, 2014

Sydney Theatre Company, July 15, 2015

The script for Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information gives little away at first glance. There are many scenes and no stage directions. Characters are not named and only very occasionally is it clear that lines or actions must be assigned to a man or a woman. There are rarely instructions about whether you need one, two or more people to enact the scene. Every now and again a certain setting is implied but mostly the characters could be anywhere. Most scenes can be achieved with only two speakers or even one but potentially there can be more. Sometimes. The choices open to the director, in other words, are multitudinous.

But there are also strict parameters. Churchill allows some flexibility about scene order but only within individual “acts” (Love and Information runs without a break for something under two hours). There are seven of these sections, each of which has seven scenes, and the play ends with an immovable final extra scene. Every scene in the main body of the text must be played, plus at least one “Depression”, a fragment of thought (there are 10 or so available) that can be placed anywhere. That means the minimum number of scenes is 51, although there can be more than 70 if a director chooses several Depressions and some or all of more than a dozen optional scenes.

It’s a fascinating combination of freedom and precision, and a structure that brilliantly illuminates one of Churchill’s central ideas. In Love and Information there is almost constant tension between certainty and uncertainty – what we think and what may be the truth; between feeling and fact. Not that we can necessarily trust everything that’s presented as gospel, or have complete faith in everything we are sure we know. In scene after scene there are secrets, deflections, illusions, evasions, misconceptions and revelations. In Wedding Video, for instance, a person can recall only the things that were recorded on that day and nothing else. In Affair, a person struggles to reveal to a friend an infidelity she knows about, one that closely affects the friend. As if happens, the friend has known for ages. Years. More chillingly, in Torture there is the following exchange: “He’ll get to where he’ll say anything.” “We’re not paid extra for it to be true.”

Churchill’s vignettes whizz by like tickertape news flashes, some as short as a few seconds, touching on information and the reception and exchange of it in many guises: scientific data, official reports, personal records, conversation, flirting, arguing, religious belief, gossip, memories and – most potently – memory itself. The accumulation of ideas is exhilarating and if some scenes fall a little flat, well, there’s another along in just a moment. For the most part, though, Love and Information zings along with the kind of wit and economy most writers can only dream of. Here, in its entirety, is the scene titled Sex:

What sex evolved to do is get information from two sets of genes so you get offspring that’s not identical to you. Otherwise you just keep getting the same thing over and over again like hydra or starfish. So sex essentially is information.

You don’t think that while we’re doing it do you?

It doesn’t hurt to know it. Information and also love.

If you’re lucky.

 

What, though, to do with all this stuff?

Love and Information premiered at London’s Royal Court in 2012 in a dazzling production directed by James Macdonald with a set by Miriam Buether. That production was restaged in New York at the Minetta Lane Theatre, which is where I saw it early last year. This year Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre joined forces for a co-production, a significantly different one directed by Kip Williams and designed by David Fleischer.

The play is hugely demanding on cast and crew. Not only are there dozens of short scenes, Churchill instructs that each involves new characters, about 100 in all. Every scene is written as a discrete entity and Macdonald’s production emphasised this disconnection. Beuther’s set, a stark white cube with lines suggesting graph paper, was rendered utterly invisible after each scene. As if by magic (a super-speedy shutter apparently) the bright light was gone and darkness engulfed the space. There was not a flicker of movement to be seen on stage. Seconds later the shutter opened in an instant – more magic – and a new scene appeared. The swiftness of changes, often reasonably elaborate, was extraordinary; almost hallucinatory. (The effect has been likened to a series of snapshots.) First you saw it; then you didn’t; then you saw something completely different.

There was a strong sense of the laboratory, with the gleaming white, the tightly circumscribed space and the implacable, impersonal blackout. The characters were pitilessly under the microscope as they tried to connect with one another in this highly controlled environment.

Williams’s production needed a different solution for the open spaces of the Malthouse and STC’s Wharf 1. Fleischer’s fluid set of large white blocks is lightly suggestive of a maze, although the elements are moved so frequently (and vividly – that swimming pool!) to create other environments that the notion of an experiment is much less strong than with Beuther’s design. The lights might be lowered as the actors move the blocks but they could be seen going about the business of altering the landscape. This flow between spaces, and between actor as character and actor as stagehand, is inescapably part of the piece.

And – this is important I think – there are only eight actors in Williams’s production where there were 16 in Macdonald’s. Williams’s men and women become very familiar and interesting to us as the play progresses. We see them a lot as they come and go, sometimes very swiftly indeed on their way to their next costume change, and Williams also chooses to populate some scenes with more than just the required speakers. Even though the actors are always playing a new part, this is very definitely a group rather than a random set of individuals. I was also very struck by one of Williams’s choices near the end of the production where he lets several scenes flow into one another in complete contrast to Macdonald’s total observation of demarcation between scenes. In the STC-Malthouse production a natural history museum amusingly complete with specimens of early ancestors and a sombre graveyard add associations and atmospherics to scenes written with no suggestion of them.

Perhaps the easiest way to define the key difference between the productions is to say that Macdonald made one observe how difficult it is to achieve true communication despite the many tools at our disposal, and how fascinating that is to study, and that Williams made one aware of how deeply people need to communicate, no matter how imperfectly they do it. Macdonald’s production looked elegant, sophisticated, cool, distancing. It was a technical tour de force. Williams’s is warmer and more touching. Macdonald leaned towards the information side of the ledger, Williams is drawn to love. There is great value in both and each gave me different insights into the play.

E.M.Forster’s famous lines from Howards End come to mind: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.”

Love and Information continues at Sydney Theatre Company until August 15.