Drama on the Move: Intermedial Dialogue in Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information

Staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2012, Caryl Churchill’s "Love and Information" is a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic piece about the way we know, feel and relate to our environment in the age of globalised media and digital information. In this article I look at Churchill’s way of building these thematic concerns into her dramatic architecture. In particular, I focus on intermedial dialogue as the signature formal feature of Churchill’s dramaturgy, and as a tool for engaging the audience in an immersive theatre experience that stimulates a cognitive process. Furthermore, I show that in addressing the complexities of today’s digital milieu through the vocabulary of drama and live performance, the playwright also turns her gaze, self-reflexively, onto the boundaries and possibilities of the theatrical medium, testing its capacity to adjust to a world in vertiginous flux.