Some plays are like a through-train that sails right past your station: no matter how much you may want to, you just can’t get it.
At one level An Oak Tree is the story of two men brought together by grief and loss. One is a father who mourns his dead daughter, who was knocked down by a car and the other, a provincial stage hypnotist and the driver of the vehicle. The two men meet when the father volunteers to be part of the hypnotist’s stage show.
Tim Crouch plays the shimmery waistcoat wearing hypnotist and a different actor each night plays the father and when I went it was David Harewood. What makes this cameo even more impressive is that this Famous Name has never seen or read a word of the play before he (or she) arrives on stage.
Scripted asides are given by Crouch to his actor via earphones, and a script on a clip board is referred to frequently. The caliber of the performance however, will depend on the actor’s ability to surrender himself to Crouch’s process and allow themselves to become the psychotic grieving Dad.
On one level, as a study of grief, this two-hander works very well. When life knocks you sideways as it does with the death of a loved one, you have no script to follow, these emotions are new and you experience it all for the first time. Life is not a dress rehearsal and we all make our scripts up as we go around, feeding off those around us for direction and sustenance.
Crouch is a great story teller, playing several roles and he feels the pain of all his characters and works tirelessly to get the best performance possible out of his actor. But it is the actor’s ability to come to terms with this role as grieving father, which reveals what it must be like to suddenly be shunted into this reality and what it is to struggle against the growing awareness that someone you love is lost to you forever. You feel the actor’s grief, in this bewildering tumult of stage directions and scripts, and you feel it profoundly.
Putting on display the mechanics of this piece and the private face of theatre, by revealing the script and the stage directions, also results is a play, which working at another level illuminates the working relationship between the two actors, between the hypnotist and his subject and between the players and their audience. But by showing you how theatre is constructed it is as if the magician has thrown back the curtain and shown you how the tricks are done. Crouch should be congratulated on this philosophical endeavour, but on this level the show is a cerebral rather than a visceral experience.
Grief and loss do strange things to people, and two of the many manifestations it can take are presented in An Oak Tree, an affecting account of death and loss and on a much less affecting note, a tool for exposing the machinations of theatre.
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