Jessie Buckley is hypnotised by Tim Crouch in remarkable play An Oak Tree — theatre review

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“Don’t you think it’s a bit contrived?” asks Tim Crouch of his fellow performer towards the end of An Oak Tree. It draws a laugh. This extraordinary show is absolutely, extremely and very deliberately contrived: a slippery, shape-shifting duet that keeps changing the rules of engagement — with the material, with the premise, with the audience. 

And yet. It’s as intricately constructed as a Jenga tower, though the key to it is unpredictability: a different, unrehearsed guest artist appears every night. And what makes it such a potent piece 20 years on from its premiere, is that the playful artifice comes in the service of fundamental questions about theatre, about free will and about grief. Above all, it’s an exploration of the devastating bewilderment of loss.

The basic scenario is simple, albeit emotionally loaded: an encounter between two strangers — a stage hypnotist and Andy, a middle-aged man whose young daughter was killed in a road accident. The hypnotist was the driver. Since then both men’s lives have disintegrated, certainties shattered by this one terrible moment. Now the father has sought out the hypnotist at one of his shows, a grubby affair above a pub, to try and release himself from this waking nightmare.

But what’s striking is the way Crouch handles the material, wrapping the themes of loss, control and dislocation into the structure. He plays the hypnotist every time, but his stage partner, fresh each night, has never seen the script (volunteers for this run include David Tennant, Indira Varma and Adjoa Andoh). Playing the father, they read lines from a clipboard, respond to Crouch’s instructions, improvise reactions — behave, in short, as someone under hypnosis might. Or someone poleaxed by grief. 

Rather than rehearse someone to play the father’s bereavement, then, the show’s shape reflects the disorientation — that feeling of being cast in a role in which you don’t know what to do. How many of us have longed for someone to snap their fingers and tell us something wasn’t real?

On press night that bold soul was Jessie Buckley, feeling her way into the distress of her character and putting her superb emotional honesty at Crouch’s disposal. The fact that Buckley is clearly pregnant only added another layer to the fragility of the situation: as she wiped away tears, you could feel the audience’s concern.

“How free am I?” the actor asks near the beginning. It sounded genuine from Buckley — probably was — but in fact the line is scripted. It drives straight to the heart of the show’s dance with the nature of theatre — the suspension of disbelief; the way artifice can reveal truth; the roles of the writer, director and actor in shaping understanding. But it’s also a nagging philosophical question about the level of control any of us has and our need to find meaning.

If it all sounds impossibly abstract, it’s certainly a danger. But Crouch embraces that, raising questions about the show’s validity and handling of this painful material, constantly drawing attention to his own manipulation of events. And what’s really remarkable, and moving, is that, in the midst of it all, Buckley made us see a grieving father, sitting on the ground and telling us his daughter has become an oak tree. None of it is true, yet we understood her.

★★★★☆

To May 24, youngvic.org