Star Zahra Newman Explains Her Dislike Of Social Media

Featuring more than 100 characters across 57 scenes in the space of 105 minutes, Love And Information is to be performed by a cast of just seven in the upcoming Malthouse/Sydney theatre Company production directed by Kip Williams.

“How do you put this on? was my first question for Kip,” Newman laughs. “There’s no characters, I don’t even think there’s any requirements about how many people should be cast! I was intrigued by it because there is a lot of freedom within the text – there are these rules that you are required to follow, but there’s a lot of freedom within that. You are given a lot of dramaturgical license in terms of how you structure it, what scenes go where, who plays what… It’s exciting to be able to work on something like this because it is going to be an ensemble piece because we have to make it together, we have to build the world together, we have to make dramaturgical decisions about what stories we want to tell.”

The unifying line of investigation for the work is connection – the way we connect in a modern world. It’s posing questions and challenging the contemporary notion of how we connect and how we love. “I think Tinder is one of the most destructive things to happen to relationships in the modern world. I think it’s a false sense of connection; it leads people down a path of hiding behind a screen, that’s not a scene in the play but…” Newman’s brief fury fizzling, she reframes her thoughts on Love And Information. “It makes you think about things around how we connect, therefore how we love, how we communicate in a world where we are actually redefining what it is to be a friend, like someone, have a relationship with someone – you know, we’re redefining all these elements of being social. I’m a little bit old school. I’m not on any social media at all, I use my phone to check the weather and the news, you know? And people sometimes perceive that as me being anti-social, or not wanting to connect with people, and actually it’s because I don’t want to not connect with people – that’s why I avoid it. I’d much prefer to have a face-to-face, or what I perceive to be a much more genuine connection.”