'An Oak Tree' review — Tim Crouch's experimental play is both strange and revelatory

Read our review of An Oak Tree, now in performances at The Other Palace to 15 November.

Summary

• Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree comes to The Other Palace
• The experimental play features a rotating cast of famous guests
• The story involves a hypnotist being confronted by a grieving father

Tim Crouch's participatory, meta-theatrical experiment has been around for over two decades, and now arrives at The Other Palace with a new rotating cast of famous guests including Juliet Stevenson, Olivia Williams, Tanya Reynolds, Reece Shearsmith, and George Fouracres.

Tonight it's Death Valley star Gwyneth Keyworth, who we're told has never seen the show and doesn't know what to expect. Well, me neither, and what unfolds is something strange, at points revelatory, and at others confoundingly opaque.

It's not a spoiler to say that Crouch plays the character of a hokey stage hypnotist, and his guest the role of an audience member, Andy, who turns up to one of his shows with an agenda. That's because the hypnotist recently killed Andy's daughter in a car accident, and he is eager to speak to him face to face.

However, first there's some hypnosis to be done, and Andy - whose lines are fed through headphones, or via scripts on a number of clipboards - proves a malleable participant. It isn't long before, as so often with performative hypnosis, the lines are blurring between fiction and reality, entertainment and exploitation.

Crouch has an idiosyncratic, affected speaking style, and his hypnotist is a menacing presence. He dominates his guest – reassuring them (“You’ll be great”) whilst exercising auteur-like control. The story sets up an expected confrontation, but it never really arrives, and the action regularly halts so that Crouch can break character (or does he?).

As ever with Crouch’s work there’s a sense of the academic exploring a theory, one that theatre itself, the artiface of being on a stage in front of an audience, creates a chemistry that can be altered. He gleefully shifts gears, changes moods, stumbles over words knowing the inherent tension this causes – a pianist deliberately playing the wrong notes.

It requires the guest to lean in, to pour themselves into the character, play scenes where they’re hypnotised in humiliating ways, while regularly having the rug pulled from under them. If this was a random audience member it could feel like it was crossing the line, but because they’re a performer who has opted in any ethical doubts are assuaged.

He strays into some heavy subject matter. This is the second show I’ve seen this week centring on the fallout of a fatal car accident involving a child, and it’s a subject about as bleak as they come, not least because of the disconcerting sense of it being so familiar. Crouch’s guest describes the grief as a series of vivid colours – “the policeman walked up the path in red”. For all the experimentation there is tenderness too.

But by the end, like Andy, I was left feeling a slight sense of longing for closure, for a climax that stays frustratingly out of reach. As with the Michael Craig-Martin artwork it references, I can admire the concept and the artistry of the piece, while not entirely connecting to it on an emotional level.

An Oak Tree is at The Other Palace to 15 November. Book An Oak Tree tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: An Oak Tree (Photos by Pamela Raith Photography)