Review Round-up: Do critics Love Churchill’s new play?

Michael Coveney
Whatsonstage.com
★★★★

I’m not quite sure how it happens, but every time Caryl Churchill writes a play she breaks the mould. In some ways, Love and Information is a sketch show. In others, it’s a detonating minefield of suggestion and pessimism…it’s a playground of mini-plays, dazzlingly exposed on Miriam Buether‘s unadorned stage, lit by Peter Mumford, and directed with a merciless wryness by James Macdonald…These are word games of the highest order, ellipitical, yes, but not puzzling, and immediately comprehensible in the theatre… Observation leaks into vigilance, spying, censorship. Human life is mysterious but we know too much about each other and no-one is safe. You come away feeling down-hearted and anxious. Even actors have been deprived of their security blankets, characters to latch on to for a while before dissolving in the stew once more.

Michael Billington
Guardian
★★★★

…What is extraordinary about Churchill is her capacity as a dramatist to go on reinventing the wheel… on this occasion she has come up with something that feels like an intimate revue written by Wittgenstein…Churchill’s play, in short, is a humanist document that, in Macdonald’s dazzling production, makes vivid use of theatre’s technical resources. Miriam Buether’s white-walled chamber set which opens and closes like a camera shutter, Christopher Shutt’s variegated sound design and Laura Draper’s stage management ensure that one scene follows another with lightning speed… Each spectator will have a different vision of what this defiantly nonlinear show is really about. For me, Churchill suggests, with compassionate urgency, that our insatiable appetite for knowledge needs to be informed by our capacity for love.

Paul Taylor
Independent
★★★★

…the thought-experiments of Wittgenstein spring to mind when watching Caryl Churchill’s uneven but highly stimulating new revue of a play….What is it to know something? Is it better know things or not to know things?…Churchill airs these questions in a swift-footed, witty, sometimes haunting, show that is itself a calculated and droll example of information-overload. Breathtakingly well-directed by James Macdonald, it unfolds in fifty-seven black-out sketches in which a superlatively versatile sixteen-strong cast play over a hundred non-recurring characters…Performed on Miriam Buether’s clinical white-cube set, each piece has a slightly hallucinatory distinctness. The text is bare of stage directions, so it is Macdonald who has imaginatively fleshed out the contexts…“Knowledge comes but wisdom stays,” wrote Tennyson. Dramatising a world where we have faster and faster access to more and more data but can lose our grip on the human meaning, Churchill has spiritedly updated that maxim.

Henry Hitchings
Evening Standard
★★★

Caryl Churchill’s first new full-length play in six years… feels bright and strange, while preserving plenty of her work’s familiar traits: a sense of mischief that’s human rather than merely foxy, an interest in the textures of ordinary speech, and a desire to probe ethical entanglements and lay bare the nature of power…The scenes are clipped and elliptical. Some are funny, others bleak, and most are cryptic… James Macdonald’s production… succeeds in making even the briefest of Churchill’s sketches feel fully inhabited. All (16 actors) demonstrate their versatility but the standouts are Laura Elphinstone, John Heffernan, Sarah Woodward and Rhashan Stone… For all its ingenuity and the crispness of Macdonald’s interpretation, it doesn’t afford any great revelations, and the vividness it creates is ephemeral.

Charles Spencer
Daily Telegraph
★★★★