Mobile Dramaturgy: Digital Affect in Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information

This paper examines the dramaturgy of Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012) in relation to the affective loop of performance in a digitalised society. The play is an interesting example of formal experimentation and textual openness, presenting over fifty micro-scenes that can be staged in no particular order within the allotted seven sections and about one hundred characters that require no specific typecasting. Furthermore, no hierarchical structure prevails, information is presented in a continuous additional fashion, equating higher themes to lower ones. There is no build-up, no chain of events that may be interpreted as a correlation cause-and-effect: the fragments appear one after another, a mere accumulation of data. However, the withdrawal of the author’s demiurgic qualities – such as weaving in multiple stories in a composite recount – is here deliberately political: the amorphous mosaic depicted by Churchill speaks to the short-spanned fast-paced world of today’s ‘information age.’ Indeed, each scenario traverses the stage and collapses in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, specks of humanity scattered around, undigested by the confused spectator. The digital revolution promised to connect us all, but alienation resulted as one of its byproducts. Instant connections do not allow time for depth, so that some questions naturally arise: how does the information overload which characterises contemporary society affect our capacity to build meaningful relationships? Or develop our own take on the world? Churchill steps back to allow us to seep it all in, the unfiltered conflation of input, and make it what we will. Love and Information manages to create, for that initial puzzlement and wonder, a temporary community of significance, whose cognitive process continues long after the curtains fell. Thus, the alleged ‘death of the author’ calls for the responsibility of the audience, in order to re-ignite the affective discourse and experience theatre unmediated.