Postdramatic Crisis of Narration and Infocracy in Love and Information by Caryl Churchill

Abstract

Caryl Churchill is Britain’s most celebrated and influential playwright of the post-war period. Her name has become an exceptional phenomenon in contemporary British theater since her first professional production of Owners (1972). Churchill’s plays have been praised for their bold and innovative style, tackling complex themes such as gender, politics, and power dynamics in a nuanced and challenging manner. Throughout her career, Churchill has observed the era in which she experiences and addresses social issues by creating characters living in harsh conditions. Despite her advancing age, she continues to convey the universal problems of the twenty-first century stemming from neoliberalism. Love and Information, first staged at the Royal Court Theatre in 2012, is undoubtedly one of the most significant works from her new millennium plays, confronting the spirit of the neoliberal agenda. It is a postdramatic text that invites the audience to engage with the themes and ideas rather than follow a linear plot, which reflects the complexity and ambiguity of the information-saturated world. In this regard, examining the impact of information and communication technologies on contemporary globalized society, the play demonstrates Byung-Chul Han’s ideas on infocracy and the crisis of narration. Han argues that a society driven by neoliberalism fosters pathologies stemming from an obsession with maximizing digital culture. Considering Han’s perspective, this study analyzes how Churchill portrays the human condition in the digital age and how she experiments with postdramatic narration and the information regime.