Page 272 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

useful showcase for the students as well as the School’s facilities including several larger capacity
auditoria and a smaller studio space where this production of Love and Information takes place.
Director Pooja Ghai uses three or four cameras which give the remote audience a chance to
connect with the contrasting intimacy and scale of Churchill’s multi-faceted, multi-character
story.

Love and Information first performed in 2012 is a fragmented and episodic exploration primarily
of love and relationships, but also of memory, ritual, social expectations, fate and science, God
and modes of control in which scenes or snatches of conversation appear before the audience in a
seemingly disordered and deliberately disarranged state. Containing more than 100 characters,
performed here by 10 actors, Churchill’s play has variegated effects, the value of which builds as
the production unfolds, prioritising breadth and comment over character depth, traditional
narrative direction and distinct thematic shape.

Nonetheless, Churchill’s skills is in seeming to arrive at the crux of the conversations her
characters are having without us, removing unnecessary preamble or post-event debate so that
the audience is delivered to the heart of the moment and removed from the lives of these
creations just as swiftly as we arrived in them. Sometimes, those interactions last a few minutes,
others a few seconds, but each is given an equality of importance in Churchill’s concept with its
unique title cards for each – subtly included in Ghai’s Guildhall production on small ticker-tape-
style banner screens – be it Wedding Video, Maniac or Dinner. There is an overriding feeling in
the play that these have been edited for our consumption, so whatever the wider lives of this 100
or so people might be, whoever they are and whatever their relationship has been or may yet be,
only this moment, these few seconds is what we need to see.

Every scene is, then, singularly important and in service to the overall effect of Churchill’s play,
with no value distinction made between big and little lives, conventional and unusual ones, or
happy or sad experiences, only that individually and together they have been chosen, that they
are representative of the experiences of love. The seemingly scatter-gun presentation has its own
momentum, a snowballing rhythm that builds in intensity as the piece unfolds in which the
viewer will recognise everyday scenarios and questions, while noting some of the recurring
themes across Churchill’s expression of human experience.

Rather than an alienating process which the continual lurch between scenarios could create,
instead there is a confederacy, a drawing-in of the audience motored by the rhythms of the
dialogue and the binge-like quality of the drama (before that was really an established mode of
cultural consumption). As unexpectedly as it starts, it stops – its not really appropriate to
describe it as an end – and this impressive Guildhall production never lags.

Staged in and around a series of doorways, Designer Rosa Maggiora has created a space with
limited physical movement around the playing area but with plenty of entrances and exits which
seem to echo the snapshot nature of Churchill’s play where endings and beginnings are voids
through which the main event occurs. The changing use of material across the design also nods to
the thematic references in the text – the central freestanding doors are made of plastic and glass