Genius writing allowed to shine
Love and Information
(out of 4) By Caryl Churchill, directed by Tanja Jacobs and Alistair Newton. Until April 29 at the Berkeley Street Downstairs Theatre, 26 Berkeley St. canadianstage.com or 416-368-3110
Whistleblowers in hiding. Lab testing on chickens. A panicked flashback. Memories of a past love. A child who doesn’t know pain. Stargazing.
The great English playwright Caryl Churchill’s latest major work, premiered in 2012, is a pileup of such acute, fragmentary impressions. The script is made up of 50 short scenes, some as brief as five lines long. They are split into seven sections, the order of which is prescribed, but within the sections the scenes themselves can be performed in any order.
As is always the case with Churchill (and what makes her a genius), this approach to form doesn’t just complement the play’s content: it enacts it. Love
and Information is a reflection of the contemporary moment as we struggle to craft sense out of all the fragments of experience that bombard us every day. It asks implicit questions about how we turn raw data into something meaningful: what is the journey from information to love?
There is nothing prescribed about what this should look and feel like onstage: the number of performers, who speaks what line and design choices are all left wide open. One imagines this is a combination of daunting challenge and massive treat for a director or, in this case, two directors. As recent MFA graduates of York University’s directing program, Alistair Newton and Tanja Jacobs were each given a slot in the Canadian Stage season and they opted to stage Churchill’s script together.
Perhaps consciously taking a different tack from James Macdonald’s ultra-peeled-back world-premiere production at London’s Royal Court, where the play was staged in a sterile white cube, Newton, Jacobs and set/costume designer Eo Sharp pile on visual detail.
A white grid is taped on the black floor of the Berkeley Theatre stage and a parallel grid backdrop hangs behind the playing area. There’s a shed structure in the middle of the stage, which the actors push in circles on a revolve, pulling down flaps to serve as tables. Clothing racks filled with costume pieces are visible off to the sides, as are the performers changing clothes and waiting for entrances.
In short, the audience’s attention is drawn to all the labour that contributes to making this theatrical event happen and this, on top of everything going on in the scenes themselves, bogs things down. Too much information.
The cast is a mix of veteran talents (Maggie Huculak and David Jansen), busy jobbing actors (Jason Cadieux, Peter Fernandes, Ngozi Paul), the upand-comer Sheila Ingabire-Isaro, and newcomers Sarah Deller and Reid Millar (who’s only 19).
Each one of them has standout moments, and the strongest scenes are those that give the impression that we’re dropping into the middle of complex relationships and deeply felt emotions.
Clear costume and staging choices go a long way in establishing scenarios, as when a distraught Huculak asks Millar, who’s wearing an orange jumpsuit, “God told you to do it?” through telephone receivers and a pane of glass.
Jansen gives the powerful impression of a hunted, Snowden-like figure, shouting at journalists through a barred door in “Recluse.” Two of the women, in a fashionably noisy bar, rationalize an upcoming episode of infidelity in “Dream.”
But there are also a lot of details that may have emerged organically out of rehearsal room experimentation but feel in performance like unnecessary embellishment. In “Virtual,” which uncannily presages the Spike Jonze film Her, Cadieux questions Fernandes about his obsession with some digital entity — but why does one of them need to be in a wheelchair?
“Wedding Video” makes spoton points about how our reliance on visual documentation is undermining our capacity to remember, but Huculak’s presence in the scene bangs the point home unnecessarily. And while Cadieux as a police informant and Paul as his stressed-out partner drop us straight into the intrigue of “Grass” (English slang for “snitch”), it’s not clear why they’re being followed around by a camera and a boom mic.
All this filigree gives the impression that Jacobs and Newton didn’t fully trust the material to hold the evening together, but it’s the brilliant specificity of Churchill’s observations and the clarity of her writing that linger long after the performance is over.