Theatre

Like the faltering recording of a young girl practising Bach which is re-played at crucial moments, Tim Crouch’s ‘An Oak Tree’ is a series of variations. Each night, an actor who has never read the script takes on the role of the girl’s father. Crouch plays a hypnotist who accidentally killed her on the road, and this is his show.Conventionally, it’s empty-handed. No costume, no rehearsal, few props except microphones and empty chairs.

Crouch slips between roles, from the stammering hypnotist who’s forgetting his script and losing his powers of suggestion, to the omnipotent writer-actor-director who mutters silent instructions via a headset to his obedient accomplice. It’s a show which exposes the workings of theatre, and deeply suggestive about how fantasies and fictions can arise in the mind, be acted out, and why. It aims at theatre’s borrowed heart, makes you conscious of how its imaginative blanks are filled by the insertion of actors’ bodies into roles and audiences’ feelings into the story. It’s fascinating to see something potent flare out of a couple of jeans-clad figures reading from clipboards, and equally fascinating to see it fail. The beauty of it is that the actors needn’t act very much at all.

Although the set-up with the guest actor is time-consuming and over-solicitous, the piece concludes with power, grace, and a synaesthetic burst of colour. The defining moment, where ‘Death walked through into the lounge… put his helmet on the piano stool, spoke to us in silver… then pronounced two concrete blocks in black and left them to hang against my ribcage’ speaks out clearly, as the ‘Goldberg Variations’ do beneath the errors of the girl’s piano practise.