Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Caryl Churchill, directed by Tanja Jacobs & Alastair Newton
Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
April 12-29, 2018
“My head’s too full of stuff”
Caryl Churchill is rightly regarded as the greatest living British playwright. The reason for this is that virtually every play she writes pushes back the boundaries of what theatre is and can be. Canadian Stage has mustered the courage to stage one of her most difficult, daring and fascinating works – Love and Information from 2012. In the original production 16 actors played more than 100 roles. In this production that task falls to only eight actors. While one may quibble about the direction by Tanja Jacobs and Alastair Newton, the play remains one that anyone interested in the possibilities of 21st century theatre must see.
The play is divided into 57 scenes ranging from two to five minutes in length. These scenes are divided into seven sections, with seven scenes in the first six sections and eight in the seventh. Churchill states: “The sections should be played in the order given but the scenes can be played in any order within each section”. There are also ten one-line “Depression Scenes” in which a character speaks to another who does not respond. Churchill says that at least one of these must be included. Besides that there are 16 additional scenes listed as “Random” that can be added to any of the seven sections.
Love and Information is also unusual in that all of the dialogue is unassigned with few stage directions and no indications of name, age or gender. The director has to decide who speaks what with whom and in what circumstances. The one rule is that the characters must be different in every scene.
The subjects the play addresses are right there in the title – the relation of love to information. Information, of course, nowadays has the additional connotation of the technological expansion of information and the feeling that many suffer now from information overload. By refracting these subjects through the medium of so many unconnected scenes the structure of Churchill’s play reflects this very feeling of information overload. Churchill forces us to find our own way through the fragmented reality she presents to find a clue to what may help us survive this avalanche of information or to succumb to if we allow the avalanche to bury us. The present production through its selection, ordering and casting of the mini-scenes indicates that a positive outcome to the battle between love and information is possible.
There is a key scene that makes this point that the directors Jacobs and Newton have decided to underscore (contrary to Churchill’s intentions) by playing it three times in a row with three different couples. In the scene entitled “Sex” one character says to another: “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 is essentially information”. To this the other character replies,”You don’t think that while we’re doing it do you?” to which the first character says, “It doesn’t hurt to know it. Information and also love”.
In contrast to this is a scene called “Tsunami” where a woman (Sarah Deller) describes how deeply affected she was by the images on television of the devastation of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, so touched by the people’s suffering she couldn’t stop crying. To her work colleague (Sheila Ingabire-Isaro), however, the event meant nothing. They were merely images on a screen. Here love of empathy is balanced with mere information. In a more complex vision of love and information, a wife (Maggie Huculak) visits her husband (David Jansen) who has dementia and does not know her. She tries to convince him she is his wife and thinks maybe the feel of her skin will prove it. We can tell that the feel does bring back the memory of love, but suddenly he rejects his wife because he thinks she is a different woman from his wife. Here love has survived the loss of information but in the most ironic manner.
All eight actors work as a tight ensemble and it is a wonder they can keep the myriad characters they play so clearly in their minds. Jason Cadieux is especially good as a slimy interviewer who suggests that the ancient Greeks were right to drown the mathematician Hippasus who came up with the notion of irrational numbers, a mathematical concept they found outrageous. Later Cadieux stands out as a man suffering from hyperthymesia, a neurological disorder that causes a person to remember their lives in abnormal detail.
Sarah Deller well plays a young woman whose dream warns her of infidelity that she assumes refers to her husband (though perhaps not) and is hilarious as a pampered older woman who visits her therapist who helps convince her that her life means something.
Peter Fernandes is most effective as a paraplegic who is in love with his virtual reality girlfriend and is convinced that she loves him back even when his friend insists that her “love” is just the result of a complex algorithm.
Maggie Huculak impresses in a number of delectable roles. Her most amusing role is as an elderly woman who tells her friend (Cadieux) that she wants to remember as much as possible and has just learned about the Roman system of the “method of loci”, which she calls the “House of Memory”. In her mental “house” she places an absurd list of items in absurd places in order to recall them better. The wonderful part of the scene, however, is when her face is suddenly transformed because instead of finding one of her placed items she recalls an image of her long-dead father that she had had when she was only four.
Huculak is delightful in two other scenes of the recurrence of long dormant memories. In one, she is a bent-over, seemingly deaf old woman, but when a young man (Reid Millar) plays the Merry Widow waltz on the piano, she suddenly sits up and sings along with the English lyrics. Later, in a silent scene, she plays another aged woman who can barely move forward with her walker until she finds her difficulty reminds her of dancing and she does such a poignant dance with her walker it leaves a lump in your throat.
Sheila Ingabire-Isaro’s finest moment is probably in the final scene where she plays a young memory whizz who knows the most arcane trivia imaginable. Yet, when her tutor (Jansen) slips in the phrase “I love you”, she is at first annoyed and keeps answering his trivia questions until she slyly slips in her reply.
David Jansen plays a wide range of roles from a recluse fearful of people knowing where he is to a tawdry memory artist whose cheap act provides the prelude to Jason Cadieux’s following scene as the hyperthymesiac. His scene as the demented husband noted above and as an enraged employee fired by e-mail are also outstanding.
19-year-old Reid Millar excels in numerous roles. Perhaps the most disturbing that that of a young man in a prison uniform being visited by his mother (Huculak). He tries to explain to her how God spoke to him in his heart to tell him to do whatever crime he committed that has caused his imprisonment. The fervour of his mysterious relationship with God combined with his indifference toward his mother make the episode memorably chilling.
Ngozi Paul’s most extended seen is when she plays the ex of a man (Jansen) when both are caught in the rain. She relates fond recollections of when they were together and in love, but Paul makes us feel that the more she remembers the good times of the past the more painful her experience of the present becomes until she force to flee the man and the memories he evokes.
The action is played out on a Eo Sharp’s black set divided by white lines into squares to a depth of seven and a width of twelve. The look invites inappropriate comparisons with the holodeck that featured so often in Star Trek: Next Generation. The play has nothing to do with science fiction. In the centre of the stage is a large black cube whose sides can become a house front or interior, a bed or a table. No legs hide the wings so that the cast changes costumes on either side of the black playing area, thus reminding us, as if we needed it, that we are watching a play in a theatre.
One would think this system would facilitate rapid scene changes, but for unknown reasons Jacobs and Newton allow the pace to be much slacker than it should be. They even deliberately slow it down by including two group dance scenes around the cube (not in Churchill). It is not clear how many of Churchill’s 57 scenes the directors used, but from a comparison with other productions, it appears they have omitted some of the scenes like “Censor” that Churchill did not label as “Random”.
The directors’ strangest alteration is not to present the scene that Churchill specifies as the “Final Scene” at the end. It is the scene about “The Child Who Did Not Know Fear” and is meant to be the only one in which the entire cast takes part. The directors have already ruined that structure by having the cast appear together for both dance scenes, for the scene of the employee’s firing and for another where six actors mimic the gestures of two speakers. It’s a perverse approach to take to disobey a renowned playwright’s instructions for her play’s first professional production in Toronto.
Despite these flaws in direction, Love and Information is a masterpiece and shows that Caryl Churchill, now aged 79, is still more filled with genre-breaking ideas that most younger playwrights who are too concerned about fitting in. Lovers of theatre should see how Churchill holds a mirror up to our labyrinthine world and trusts us enough to find a pattern in this reflection – one that is too difficult to see when we are living in the midst of reality itself.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive
Photo: (from top) David Jansen, Peter Fernades, Sheila Ingabire-Isaro, Sarah Deller, Ngozi Paul, Jason Cadieux, Maggie Huculak and Reid Millar; Ngozi Paul and David Jansen with Sheila Ingabire-Isaro and Reid Millar (above); Reid Millar and Maggie Huculak. ©2018 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2018-04-13
Love and Information