Brighton Fringe 2024
Love and Information
Northbrook College
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre, Youth Theatre
Venue: Lantern Theatre, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
Caryl Churchill’s 2012 Love and Information comes to the Lantern Theatre as part of Northbrook College’s Level 4 Professional Diploma in Performance, directed by Polly Broad and Jan Ford, also one of the two AV operators. It’s quite exceptional, the best youth theatre production I remember seeing.
An outstanding production of young showcase theatre
Written by Caryl Churchill, Directed by Polly Broad and Jan Ford (also AV), Set Design Sam Tugwell and Costume Design by the Cast, Lighting and AV Callum Farthing and Sound Direction Jan Ford, Production Stage and Tech Designer Erin Burbridge.
(Level 4 Professional Diploma in Performance)
Till May 20th
Review
“There was someone called Hippasus in Greek times who found out about the diagonal of a square and they drowned him because no-one wanted to know things about that.”
Caryl Churchill’s 2012 Love and Information comes to the Lantern Theatre as part of Northbrook College’s Level 4 Professional Diploma in Performance, directed by Polly Broad and Jan Ford, also one of the two AV operators. It’s quite exceptional, the best youth theatre production I remember seeing.
They’ve opted for the full version too. So with the original 51 scenes with unallocated lines, in elliptical late Churchill mode, there’s three “random” extras, which in this case the team have seized on to create 54, with 15 graduating actors (the original had 16; this full casting works better than slimmed-down ones).
Often this play is produced as Churchill sanctions, with one mandatory scene, then any from the seven sections but in that order. Northbrook and Broad have gone for all of them in order of text, which being the way Churchill envisaged, seems right too.
The limits of life in a terminal diagnosis, but how long? Can you love an algorithm? Is love merely genetic information waiting to happen? In this frantically assembled kaleidoscope, over a hundred characters try to piece what they know.
A sister confesses she’s her sister’s mother, when just 13, and the father was 12. But should the daughter let her former mother know that she knows she’s her grandmother? They’re speaking like Beckett heads above two large cubes.
Music’s infantilised till it isn’t. A bedtime story treats of a child with no fear but ends like a Saki one. People in extremes are buffeted against the foolishly complacent. Every aspect of living is turned on its head, and that head’s rewired.
You’d think Churchill with so many scenarios revisits obsessions; but they’re never the same. So we don’t get cloning as in her 2002 A Number, but we do get something analogous to question what being human and conscious is.
Someone sneezes. Someone can’t get a signal. Someone shares a secret. Someone won’t answer the door. Someone put an elephant on the stairs. Someone’s not ready to talk. Someone is her brother’s mother. Someone hates irrational numbers (see from the top). Someone told the police. Someone got a message from the traffic light. Someone’s never felt like this before.
“Is it better to know things or not know things?” Someone falls in love with a computer game: “She’s just information”.. she doesn’t understand you… fine all right she exists but so does your shoe or a can of…” “Yes I’ve seen her but she doesn’t…“ “because she doesn’t exist.” This all delivered in a lithe, serpentine exchange.
This is a production at full stretch: in just 72 minutes the large cast hurtle about and stay very still. The most spectacular element of this production glows from the outset. Lighting and AV from Callum Farthing and sound direction too from Jan Ford also working on AV, deploy video projections, but not relentlessly.
At the outset they’re green and sheer white in some sci-fi mode, which morphs to lab and hospital. It alternates with red and white; in simultaneous displays of fleet-lit intricacy: with occasional video projections several effects play at once, patterned or pure.
It’s by stage and tech designer Erin Burbridge. The set by Sam Tugwell and team consists of a few cubes painted with gnomic or irrational numbers. A cast-culled white set of costumes allow the light to play and transform them.
There’s some wondrous performances particularly in the slower scenes where relationships are teased out, in the moments where Churchill’s clipped warmth flickers like a filament in a winter cabin.
Overlapping dialogue concatenating round the stage, synching with recorded or filtered voices; an offstage voice conversing with someone on it. There’s an array to dazzle.
It’s impossible to know who’s who, and only right to record all performers. Nearly everything feels true here; only the necessary headlong pace pushed a few moments of vehemence on occasions and a declamatory mode.
Sonny Attwood, Lauren Brakes, Ettie Burckett, Jem Byrne, Sandy Connell, Ohina Davidson, Lily McCathrey, Fleur MacDonald, Lilia Nagati, Connor Randall, Lilli Rogerson, Vito Taskin, Cody Thacker, Lily-Mae Tuck , Matt Wason. They’re nearly all going to drama school. On this showing we’re privileged to see such names so early.
Huge credit to Broad and her team for helping to realise this, though as they insist, actors had a huge say in how this went. In any case it’s an outstanding production of young showcase theatre.
