Love and Information, Royal Court Theatre, review The great thing about Caryl Churchill is that you never know where she is going to jump next. Over the years she has ranged from satirical verse comedy about greedy bankers to a grim rural drama set in the Fens, from a dinner party attended by historical characters of different eras to a gripping, scary play about human cloning. The wit, invention and structural ingenuity of Churchill's work are remarkable and, like the sexual tease in the Sondheim song, she never does anything twice. There is, however, a downside to Caryl Churchill's plays - at least as far as a crusty old Tory like me is concerned. Her right-on, Left-wing politics are often manifest on stage and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You (2006) was as glib and nasty a piece of anti-American agitprop as I have ever seen. What's more, although her work is almost always intriguing, I rarely find myself moved by it. Now 74, Churchill has once again come up with a work that takes its audience by surprise. Love and Information packs more than 50 scenes into less than two hours and features a superb cast of 16 playing more than a hundred characters. Almost all the scenes consist of just two unnamed people talking, often about relationships, as the title suggests but also on a vast range of other topics from mathematics and multiverse theory to the human response to love, suffering, fear, grief and depression. Some of the scenes are just a few lines long, while the longest (and most boring) runs to five pages. Churchill's point is that we live in an age in which we are bombarded by information, and the play exemplifies this by requiring the audience to get to grips with such a vast array of characters and ideas. It's the dramatic equivalent of going through countless emails, some interesting, some touching, some funny, some alarming, and many downright dull. A bewildering sense of information overload sets in and on my return from the theatre I realised that probably only half a dozen of the many scenes had lodged themselves firmly in my memory. So I read the play and once again a good deal of it still failed to linger in my mind. Indeed I find myself haunted by the suspicion that Caryl Churchill is one of those writers who jots down fragments of dialogue in a notebook for possible future use and has now simply decided to chuck all these random scraps into one play. One also feels she is squandering potentially potent material. The scene in which a woman confides to a young boy that she is not his sister, as he believes, but his mother, is almost insultingly glib in its refusal to explore the emotional consequences of such a revelation. There is no doubt, however, that James Macdonald directs a dazzlingly slick and sharp production. Scene follows scene with amazing speed, each punctuated by a brief black-out. Designer Miriam Buether establishes locations with minimalist panache and the outstanding acting company, ranging from youngsters to oldies bring their sketchily drawn characters to vivid, persuasive life. It's just a shame that one leaves the show with the slightly sick feeling of having spent an evening gorging on canapés.