Review: LOVE AND INFORMATION, Crucible Studio, Sheffield

What does it mean to feel? What are memories, and how do they work? How can we live in a world of information overload and sift through the clamour of messages to find that which is important - and important by whose standards anyway?

These big questions, and more, run through Caryl Churchill's Love and Information. Through a plethora of short scenes and over 100 characters, Churchill grapples with the nature of existence, meaning, memory and connection.

Love and Information is a very untraditional work. Churchill has written characters that are, mostly, without gender, age, ethnicity or other identifying features, leaving it up to the cast and crew of any given production to infuse these layers into how they choose to perform the piece. In addition, whilst Churchill's text organises the scenes into seven key blocks, the order of sequences of scenes within those blocks is flexible.

This makes the production a somewhat organic collaboration between the writer, who has left a series of breadcrumbs, and the director, production team and cast, who need to find a way to make these breadcrumbs into a trail they can walk and that the audience can follow.

This piece is not an easy work to tackle, but with its challenges and complexities, there is a great room for creative endeavour and that must make it an incredibly rewarding piece to work on for directors, production staff and cast alike.

Whilst the number of actors required is not specified and previous productions have utilised several more than the cast of the Sheffield show, here we have six performers (Debbie Chazen, Marian McLoughlin, Mercy Ojelade, Ciaran Owens, Ian Redford, Sule Rime) who, between them, take on dozens of different characters.

We cross quickly between scenes and themes as foley artists, mathematicians, gospel choirs and even Father Christmas make appearances, and the set takes us across many locations, from broadcasting studios to family living rooms; from AI labs to a home straight out of a modern horror - cut off from electricity, telecommunications and wi-fi. And speaking of horror, this show crosses genres as well, taking in radio soap opera, sci-fi, sitcom, children's TV, quiz shows and much more along the way.

The ingenuity in Churchill's writing to bring together such a wide range of settings, themes, moods and characters is staggering. She is comfortable debating mathematics and physics, biology and psychology, along with philosophy, politics, linguistics, art theory and dozens more fields.

The actors show an astonishing range - having to operate puppets at one stage, and even having to sing in multiple styles, from a torch-song interpretation of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" to a hilarious gospel track backing a curious story told by a charismatic preacher.

Each of them brings real energy and depth to this piece and copes well with the sheer amount of material; there is only one moment where there were noticeable line drops, and even these were quickly recovered from. They are clearly having a blast playing in this world - moving between emotions, accents and situations effortlessly and bringing us characters who feel well-considered, even with only a few seconds' stage time in some cases.

With no interval, and an-hour-45-minute running time, this production felt a little daunting going in - however, for me, the time flew, as scenes seamlessly transition from one to the next via incredible lighting effects (designed by Johanna Town) and soundscapes (designed by Ben and Max Ringham).

Designer Max Jones has had a lot of fun in the sandbox of Churchill's world. The set consists of two levels of window-like arches - somewhat reminiscent of the Muppet Show at times, which I suspect is deliberate. This set-up is utilised brilliantly - at times confining action to one small, intimate, window, at others, serving as backdrop for a bigger scene. The costume design is well put together, with as many different costumes as there are characters - no small order for Jones's team.

At first, the production is a little disorienting; the source material is so fragmented and stories begin without necessarily closing or seeming to connect together. This can take a little bit of getting used to on behalf of the audience, and I'm not sure everybody had fully bought into the feeling of the piece even by the end.

For me, however, once I'd seen a few of the short scenes and began to pick up some of the bigger themes at work in Churchill's text, I was swept away by the production and dazzled by the way these complicated themes could be expressed in so many different settings, using so many different forms of language and performance.

Director Caroline Steinbeis has, along with the crew and cast, managed to really emphasise some of the key strands that weave throughout the work, without spoon-feeding the audience or taking away from the breathtaking spectacle of witnessing so many changes in scene, character and environment.

Like much of Churchill's work, I suspect Love and Information is quite divisive. Some will, perhaps, be unable to ever really engage in a piece that is not rooted in any one time, place, or situation. It is also true that some scenes are more interesting or engaging than others (although even the ones that don't work so well are quickly replaced by something else).

Don't expect a clear-cut narrative here - see this piece as a way of bringing out the broader themes of what it means to be human, to engage with others and to think about themes of love, information, communication, memory and feeling - and how these ideas cross over into many contexts.

Even for those who may struggle with the abstract nature of the work, there is so much effervescence in the performance and staging that it will be hard not to at least be swept away by the ingenuity of it all and the breathless energy of the cast.

Love and Information is at the Crucible Studio, Sheffield until 14 July.

Photo by The Other Richard.

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