Tim Crouch’s plays explore ideas about value and representation — what it means to be a spectator, for instance, and the limitations of what usually passes for realism. An Oak Tree, here revived to mark its tenth anniversary, is typical in probing the conventions of theatre.
In particular, it examines the familiar but precarious process of transformation whereby an actor becomes a character and the audience buys into this.
Crouch plays a creepy hypnotist who, we learn, is responsible for the death of a 12-year-old girl. Since this event his stage show has deteriorated, and one evening it’s further complicated when the dead girl’s anguished father Andy steps out of the audience and volunteers to take part. What follows is precisely choreographed but intriguingly fragile.
At each performance Andy is played by a different actor. Last night it was Conor Lovett, chiefly known as an interpreter of Samuel Beckett, and past participants have included Mike Myers, Eve Best and David Harewood. What’s more, the actors don’t see the script until they step onstage — Crouch meets them an hour before the show to discuss certain practical details, but the lines are not rehearsed.
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It’s fair to say that some will find the enterprise too coolly cerebral or merely a hollow exercise. Crouch pre-empts such criticism by puckishly observing that his 75-minute piece is “thinly plotted” and “contrived”. But its artifice is knowing and provocative, and the slightly jarring cleverness is matched by real emotional density.
Until July 15 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk)
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