All You Need Is Love

July 31, 2015

I am a big fan of Australian director, Kip Williams. I’ve seen a few of his plays over the last couple of years and I’ve been impressed with each one’s beauty in interpretation and design. It’s made theatre interesting and exciting to me after a long time of feeling disconnected from it.

His current work is Love and Information by British playwright Caryl Churchill, which is showing at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 Theatre until 15 August. I saw the show recently and really enjoyed it.

The play explores how we find meaning. It is made up of fifty-seven different vignettes in which one hundred characters talk about the stuff of life. Two friends share facts about their celebrity crush, a mother talks to her son with mental illness, a woman wants to start an affair with her colleague, two friends share a secret that changes their relationship, a couple lie by a pool with gossip mags, a woman explains to a new acquaintance what she does for a living. The eight-strong cast take on a mass of characters between them in this fast-paced show. The slick transitions from one scene to the next, against the shifting set design and heartfelt soundtrack, kept me involved. It was a swift ninety minutes of theatre.

The reason I liked this play was because it had momentum, emotion and depth without being too weighty or too complicated. The tone was gentle, questioning, fun, playful but never forceful. It was sincere, not sarcastic. It showed that our communication with others is as constant as breathing. We do it in so many different ways on so many levels but at the end of the day, amongst all the exchanges, the words, the facts, the silences; what matters to us most is knowing whether we are loved.

Often I sit in a theatre and feel like I’m just not intellectual enough, like I have to strain to understand the concepts and the innuendos of the playwright or the director. I’m not adverse to things going to go over my head but it’s so much fun to be able to sit in amongst an audience and feel like we all know what’s going on and we all understand the simple truths that are being shown to us. There’s a feeling of camaraderie in that. We relate to what’s happening. We all head out of the theatre smiling to each other. It was like that in Love and Information. The added bonus at our session was the Q&A at the end with Kip Williams and the cast. They were such a fun and enthusiastic bunch to listen to and I appreciate Churchill’s skill as a writer so much more from hearing their insights.

I highly recommend you grab a ticket – it’s showing for a couple more weeks. If you can book a seat for the final Q&A session on 10 August, all the better.