CONTEXT

The play that we studied is Love and information by Caryl Churchill, she was born on 3 September 1938, she is a British playwright who created plays that influenced the idea of feminist issues, the abuses of power, and sexual politics. She attended university in oxford where she began by writing some of her earliest plays which were “Downstairs” and “You've No Need to be Frightened, having a Wonderful Time” these were performed by Oxford student theatre companies. After graduating university Churchill wrote over 45 plays and received over 12 awards for her writing. She wrote a number of plays for BBC radio including The Ants (1962), Lovesick (1967) and Abortive (1971). The Judge's Wife was televised by the BBC in 1972 and Owners, her first professional stage production, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the same year. 

As a playwright, Churchill is well known for including unconventional ‘gimmicks’ in her writing, such as non-human characters like goblins, shape-shifters and clones. But it wasn’t until early on in her writing, where Churchill slowly began abandoning ‘realism’ conventions, choosing to explore with non-realist techniques, deeply inspired by Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud’s work. Churchill’s fame started to increase after she created a technique, overlapping dialogue technique she first did this while creating her play Cloud Nine in 1978 where she wanted to accurately write a couple who constantly quarrelled and spoke on top of each other. After writing Cloud Nine she began developing this technique throughout her plays. One of these plays was Top Girls a famous play that is even being shown now in 2019. Top Girls is the 24th play she has written and one of the most known as well.  Another play she created that followed the same concept was Love and information. Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information a reflection of life, which she believes is essentially a double helix of love and information. Throughout the 57 scenes of the play, many questions about love and information became apparent.  

While studying Love ad information, I used techniques that I learnt which I applied to my knowledge on acting, I used these techniques that I learnt while doing past plays to make my acting better these were the Stanislavski system while studying Chekhov, Meisner technique and the ability to make the play my own while studying Greek theatre. From these past experiences I was able to put some of that knowledge and use it for Love and information.