Tim Crouch’s experimental piece An Oak Tree returns to London this autumn with a new cast of co-stars, each seeing the script for the very first time live on stage. Previously performed with some of the greatest actors in the world, this season’s production boasts Juliet Stevenson, Olivia Williams, Suranne Jones, and Tanya Reynolds.
The evening I attended, the guest actor chosen to learn their role on the spot was Gwyneth Keyworth (Death Valley, Lost Boys & Fairies). Whatever the second actor’s gender, they play Andy, a bereaved father.
After informing Keyworth that their character is a 46-year-old father called Andy, the hypnotist says: “I accidentally killed your eldest daughter with my car.”
When the father volunteers for the hypnotist’s act to confront him, it is the first time these two men have met face to face since the car accident three months ago.
Within this set-up, the hypnotist effectively becomes a director while the hypnotised father becomes an actor, seemingly unable to distinguish reality from the lines written for them. Crouch, as both playwright and hypnotist, uses his evocative script along with piano music and the sound of traffic to create the space where he feeds various versions of the accident to Andy.
The actor who is playing the father is not required to improvise but instead they are fed instructions via headphones or read the lines from a script written by the hypnotist. Despite being taken into increasingly uncomfortable territory, puppet-like, they respond to Crouch’s instructions as someone under hypnosis might. It seems that Crouch is suggesting that grief is a form of hypnotism that takes control away too.
“How free am I?” Keyworth asks near the beginning. The line sounds natural but it is scripted, and reflects similar questions asked by the actors in Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. Like Pirandello, Crouch looks at the restrictions placed on the actor by the author.
An Oak Tree showcases the immense power of storytelling in personal narratives, while using age-old theatrical techniques, with the added risk of the shifting power dynamic of an unknown working relationship on stage. Crouch plays with memories and emotional boundaries as he jumps from different versions of one reality to another.
At the same time, Crouch never allows the audience members to forget that they are spectators watching actors act.
Meta-theatricality is the name of the game. By repeatedly breaking the fourth wall or acknowledging the audience, onlookers are forced to reflect on the contrivance of the performance and the relationship between histrionics and reality.
The title of the play references the father’s struggle to accept the loss of his daughter whom he now sees immortalised in an oak tree. “It’s not a tree anymore, I’ve changed it into Claire,” the father says, referring to his deceased daughter.
Two outstanding poetic pieces describe abstract colours at the news of the death: “the policeman walked up the path in red… she spoke two concrete blocks in black… left them inside me to this day,” while another focuses on Dawn, the mother, loudly vocalising her grief, as Andy, who is in denial of his daughter’s death, placidly reads a calming beach meditation. An Oak Tree links grieving not just to emotional trauma, but also to mental health and displacement, and Keyworth’s performance seemed to latch onto this as she delivered a broken version of Andy.
I struggled with the constant dropping of vocal projection from both performers. Tim and his chosen actor may be involved in a workshop-style production, but at the end of the day it is a public performance which has been paid for by the public, so the vocal projection expected of any trained actor should not be too much to ask for.
Because of this, by the end of the show the contrived avant-garde novelty of An Oak Tree had begun to wear off, and it all began to feel like a slightly pretentious and over-indulgent tutorial exercise between two theatre luvvies.
In its favour, An Oak Tree will always be slightly unpredictable as on another night, with another performer, it may be interpreted in a totally different way.
An Oak Tree is a marmite show which audiences will choose to love or hate, depending on whether they like this style of workshop production.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
