An Oak Tree the Orange Tree Theatre review ****

An Oak Tree

Orange Tree Theatre, 13th May 2018

Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree has been on my theatrical wish list for a little while now. First performed in 2005 at the Edinburgh Fringe it was, I understand, inspired by Michael Craig-Martin’s, (he of the day-glo technology), seminal work of conceptual art of the same name (see above) which “explains” why a glass of water balanced on a shelf is, in fact, an oak tree. Absolutely guaranteed to make the philistine’s blood boil. As so, to some extent, would Tim Crouch’s best known play.

Caryl Churchill no less described the play as “about theatre, a magic trick, a laugh and a vivid experience of grief, and it spoils you for a while for other plays”. Turns out that, for once, Ms Churchill maybe over-egging it a tad but it is still a fascinating work. Mr Crouch plays a stage hypnotist, complete with shiny waistcoat and cheap patter, whose act is crumbling, we discover, following a road accident which led to the death of a young girl (or maybe not). The other actor plays the father of the girl, Andy, who he encounters at one of his shows. The play then is ostensibly about guilt and grief, and how we process these emotions, a theatrical staple which has become something of a specialism at the OT.

But there’s a twist. The actor playing Andy, here Kate Hardie, hasn’t seen the play or the script before. Which leaves her being guided, like hypnosis, with a mixture of spoken and whispered instructions, headphones and script in hand, by Tim Crouch, in and out or character. It takes time for us, and her, to believe in Andy, though “he’ always remains slightly, and rightly, bewildered. Mr Crouch, on top of his “directing” duties also plays a character putting on an act, hypnotising an audience no less, and imagining an audience in parallel with us the real audience. We are asked to accept at various points that a chair is the dead child and that the grieving father in turns believes that an oak tree, (actually a tree which is part of the OT set for other current productions just in case this wasn’t all meta enough), is in fact his dead daughter, not just her spirit nor a symbol. It really is to him. This is analogous to the explanation of the Craig-Martin art work which informed the play. Indeed Mr Crouch exits the auditorium to fetch a glass of water at one point.

The wonder is that, as Mr Crouch piles on the deconstruction in his essay on performative language, counterpointing art and life, representation and reality, absence and presence, the artifice and magic of theatre, we actually end up caring about these two characters because of, and not in spite of, the form. No dry, academic exercise but a real play, albeit one with many conceptual layers through its 70 minutes.

You need to see it. And I need to see more of this magician’s work.