Review: Love & Information Written by: Caryl Churchill Directed by: Mohit Takalkar Produced by: NCPA in association with Aasakta Kalamanch Venue: Experimental Theatre, NCPA Date: 17 August 2024
Caryl Churchill’s narratively and modally complex and confusing (sometimes intentionally so) experimental play, Love and Information, first opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England, in 2012. In this production at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, directed by Mohit Takalkar, the show opens with what can only be described as a funeral, with the cast all dressed in black, and the scene title revealed in paint on an acrylic sheet in the background, a recurring aspect of this iteration. There is a consistent element of knowing and deciphering, a simultaneous abundance and dearth of information that the audience has access to throughout the fifty-seven scenes that we witness over the course of the two hours spent at The Experimental Theatre at the NCPA.
We dive headfirst into individual, unconnected scenes of living, persevering and even suffering through a variety of experiences with technology, love and human behaviour, all unrelated to each other. There is no one constant protagonist, and each story allows us the privilege of a new perspective. The disjointed nature of the play acts as a dynamic tool for controlling the viewer’s attention; almost mimicking the act of scrolling through shortform videos on your phone, the constant change in the narrative retains your attention for as long as it needs to before it gives you something new to think about and try to unravel. The scenes themselves explore themes such as illness, childhood innocence, the politics of sexual exploration, memory, connection (both real and imagined), and more.
Although originally staged over ten years ago, the message in Love and Information seems a prescient warning of digital devolution. In some ways, we as humans were never meant to have access to as much information as we do now, through our phones and our computers, through social media and blogs and personalised algorithms. We consume decades worth of knowledge within the span of moments, we create connections with characters—and I call them characters because, despite their absolute realness as people with individual personalities and potentially rich inner lives, we will never know them outside of the “content” they upload online—with whom we would otherwise never cross paths, only to then return to our jobs, our schools, our personal lives, where we experience a level of alienation inconsistent with the facade of interconnectedness presented to us via our screens.
I seemed to find myself especially engaged when several moments in the show, turning a mirror to the audience, forced us to both reconcile with our participation in a system that reduces the human experience to a data point as well as interrogate how we contribute to our interpersonal relationships and interact with our immediate environment while being a source of information to the technology we use. Not only did this remind me of my responsibility to the people in my life that I claim to love and care about but it urged me to look up and outwards, away from the insular bubble I occupy.
For example, in a scene titled Earthquake, we are forced to imagine ourselves living a moment presented to us, a moment of fear and potential disaster. There are two options available to anyone while imagining the plight of someone else: remove yourself emotionally from the scene of the crime, or empathize with the subject, feel for them and acknowledge within yourself the possibility of your being in their position. We are currently in an era which encourages us to choose the former, to actively dedicate ourselves and our institutions to inculcating a practice of detachment.
In some senses, I experienced moments of detachment while watching this play, despite its overall attention to detail; it felt to me as though the scenes in Hindi, Gujarati, or Marathi elicited from me a more authentic emotional reaction than the scenes in English, even though I am only fluent in one of those three languages. To have more scenes spoken in a regional language, to witness the experience of mass digitization and modern love in a country with high levels of precarity and income instability, coupled with a tradition of sexual repression, would have only enhanced the underlying themes already present.
The set itself is simple and yet busy, sometimes overly so, with the entire stage being utilized all at once only for a handful of scenes, and the sound often playing the most important character. The actors flit through characters from scene to scene, eventually recognisable less by who they are playing and more by who they have played in their previous scenes; creating a sense of connectedness where there isn’t any.
At the end of the two hours, I came away from the show with a sense of confusion, which I think was the intention of both Churchill’s original script as well as Takalkar’s direction. Questions of the individual’s role in establishing community and reconstructing our general understanding of love linger long after the play ends, encouraging the viewer to reconsider the ends to which we isolate ourselves physically from each other while creating an imagined reality of closeness with the technologies that we are now dependent upon to not only succeed but also to function.
Written by Caryl Churchill Directed by Mohit Takalkar Cast: Ashish Mehta, Dusha, Kashish Saluja, Lovleen Misra, Mahesh Saini, Mallika Singh Hanspal, Mohit Solanki, Mrinmayee Godbole, Prajesh Kashyap, Rachel Dsouza, Rytasha Rathore & Siddhesh Dhuri |
About the reviewer: Mekhala is a writer, actor and artist based in Mumbai. With an academic background in Sociology and Arts Politics, they aim to work at the intersection of theory and practice. Mekhala is an amateur baker and a budding curator, and hopes to someday earn the title of "storyteller". Wish you could have caught the play? Well you're in luck they have shows coming up soon. Know more.
Comments