Love and Information

Caryl Churchill

WHO     Unspecified. We assume the speaker is a woman.

TO WHOM     Unspecified. We assume to a lover.

WHERE     Unspecified. We assume at the entrance to her house. You decide.

WHEN     Present day.

WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED     The speech that follows is from a duologue entitled ‘Manic’. It is one of over seventy short scenes that go to make up Caryl Churchill’s full-length play Love and Information.

WHAT TO CONSIDER

•	The play is in seven sections. Within the sections there are several scenes. These scenes can be played in any order. There is no indication about what age or sex the characters are, other than the content of what is written. Here, we assume the speaker is a woman talking to her lover, for no other reason than red roses are traditionally the gift of a man to a woman. However, this need not be the case. The flowers may even be tulips or carnations, for example. Use the opportunity to create a character for yourself and make a decision about to whom exactly you are speaking.
•	The scene is entitled ‘Manic’. It is a clear indication of her state of mind. Make sure that you stay on top of her thoughts, however, and that the script does not run away with you. As you can see, there is only one full-stop in the speech right at the end.
•	The writer cleverly captures both the joy of receiving the flowers and the resulting discombobulation about what vase to use and how they should be arranged.
•	How a simple gift and, in particular, the colour red triggers her fears about life and death. Note how she struggles to convince herself that things will be all right.
•	Within the play there are over one hundred other voices all trying to cope with an information overload.

WHAT SHE WANTS

•	To thank her lover.
•	To reassure herself that red does not necessarily signify death and destruction.
•	To reassure her lover that he/she will be quite safe.

KEYWORDS     red     blood     anger     death

NB     This play offers a number of other speeches from which to choose.

 

 

Unspecified

My god, look at that flower, thank you so much, have you ever seen such a red, red is blood and bullfights and seeing red is anger but red is joyful, red is celebration,

[…]

in China red is lucky how lucky we are to have red flowers,

[…]

in China white is death and here black is death but ghosts are white of course so a chessboard is death against death, and blood of course could be death but it’s lifeblood isn’t it, if you look at the flower it’s so astounding

[…]

it means so much to me that you gave me red flowers because red is so significant don’t you think? it means stop and of course it means go because it’s the colour of energy and red cars have the most accidents because people are excited by red or people who are already excited like to have red, I’d like to have red, I’ll buy a red car this afternoon and we can go for a drive, we can go right up through the whole country don’t you think, we can go to Scotland we can go to John o’ Groats, did he eat a lot of porridge do you think? but we don’t have to start from Land’s End or Land’s Beginning we should say if we start from there but we won’t we’ll start from here because here is always the place we start from, isn’t that funny, and I need to drive along all the roads in the country because I have to see to the traffic because there are too many cars as everyone knows but our car won’t be one too many you’ll be quite safe, we’ll make sure it’s all flowing smoothly in every direction because cars do go in every direction possible and everything goes in every possible direction, so we’ll find a vase for the flowers,

[…]

I think a green vase because of the primary colours and if they were blue I’d put them in an orange vase and if they were yellow I’d put them in a purple vase, yellow and purple is Easter of course so that’s why crocuses, and red and green is Christmas which isn’t right now of course it’s the wrong time of year, I might have to sort that out when I’ve got a minute.