Reading The Material Theater

“Playwrights don’t give answers, they ask questions. We need to find new questions, which may help us answer the old ones or make them unimportant, and this means new subjects and new form” (Caryl Churchill 1960). The beauty of theatre is that it has very little limitation. One can let their mind explore and experience theatre in more than one perspective. UBC Theatre’s production of Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information is a fascinating example of how each audience member’s experience during the production can be viewed extremely differently. We should explore the ways in which we see or think about certain situations. Perhaps by asking ourselves the question, how would a deaf person interpret theatre? In this particular production at the

He considers the entire process from the production of the play, to the reception of the audience. Knowles introduces this method by using a semiotic and cultural materialistic theory, then a politicized analysis of the methods in which specific aspects of theatrical production and contexts of reception can shape an audience’s understanding of what they are experiencing during a theatre production. On page 19 of the book, specifically the image of the triangle, shows the 3 prongs of assessing culture which is crucial when completing a performance analysis. It is necessary to consider a triangle formation, which Knowles states “in which conditions of production, the performance text itself, and the conditions for its reception, operate manually constitutive poles” (Knowles 19). This triangle can be applied to assess Love and Information to find its “meaning” in a given performance situation. By looking at the cultural and social work done by the performance, as well as its performativity, the overall effect of all these systems working together is the best theory in performing performance analysis according to Knowles. “Most perforate analysis, including theatre semiotics, has concentrated its attention almost exclusively onion corner of this interpretative triangle: The Performance Text” (Knowles 19).

It should be understood, that what we think we can claim when it comes to universality is not universal at all due to our cultural responses. This can be easily explained and understood by the semiotics in language which helps us to know things are signified in the English language. There are three categories of semiotics, object, also known as iconic signs, indexical sign and symbolic sign. In Love and Information, we know that the chair in the “depression” scene is a chair even though it was a different chair from other scenes and is a different chair from the ones which the audiences are sitting on. Even though there was no same chair, we know what the object is. As for indexical signs, when characters had a scowling fail expression, we know that it is an index of displeasure or perhaps concern. In the scene that showed the child getting hurt by the skateboard with the friend who did not know what pain was, we knew that when the child pointed at her scar and said “ouch”, that the utterance of that word meant pain. In Love and Information, many props could symbolize very different things. There are even many words that we have never seen in real life, such as a devil or a unicorn or a ghost. However, some audience members may have claimed to have seen a ghost before in which every word you see or think of, could have strong associations with other words or other meanings