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“Don't you think it's a bit artificial?” asks Tim Crouch of his colleague interpreting towards the end of A oak. It makes you laugh. This extraordinary spectacle is absolutely, extremely and very deliberately artificial: a slippery and changing form which continues to change the rules of engagement – with the equipment, with the premise, with the public.
And yet. It is also finely built like a JENGA tower, although the key is unpredictable: a different guest artist and not returned appears every night. And what makes it such a powerful play 20 years after its first is that the playful artifice comes to the service of fundamental questions on the theater, on free will and on sorrow. Above all, it is an exploration of the devastating perplexity of the loss.
The basic scenario is simple, although emotionally loaded: a meeting between two foreigners – a stage hypnotist and Andy, a man of average age whose young girl was killed in a road accident. The hypnotist was the driver. Since then, the life of the two men has disintegrated, the certifications broken by this terrible moment. Now the father looked for the hypnotist at one of his shows, a dirty affair above an ad, to try to free himself from this waking nightmare.
But what is striking is the way Crouch manages the material, wrapping the themes of loss, control and dislocation in the structure. Each time he plays the hypnotist, but his stage partner, Fresh every night, has never seen the scenario (the volunteers for this race include David Tennant, Indira Varma and Adjoa Andoh). Playing the father, they read the lines of a clipboard, respond to the rush instructions, improvise reactions – behave, in short, as someone under hypnosis could. Or someone poisoned by sorrow.
Rather than repeating someone to play the father's mourning, then the form of the show reflects the disorientation – this feeling of being played in a role in which you do not know what to do. How many of us would vacuum that someone slammed our fingers and tells us that something was not real?
The evening of the press, this daring soul was Jessie Buckley, feeling his way in the distress of his character and putting his superb emotional honesty available to Crouch. The fact that Buckley was clearly pregnant added only another layer to the fragility of the situation: while she wiped tears, you could feel the public concern.
“How much am I free?” The actor asks for the start. It seemed authentic of Buckley – probably – but in fact the line is scripted. He goes directly to the heart of the dance of the show with the nature of the theater – the suspension of disbelief; The way the artifice can reveal the truth; The roles of the writer, the director and the actor in the development of understanding. But it is also a throbbing philosophical question on the level of control that we have and our need to find a meaning.
If all this seems incredibly abstract, it is certainly a danger. But Crouch embraces this, raising questions about the validity and manipulation of this painful material, constantly attracting attention to his own manipulation of events. And what is really remarkable and moving is that, in the midst of all this, Buckley made us see a father in mourning, sitting on the ground and telling us that his daughter became a oak. None of this is true, but we understood it.
★★★★ ☆
At May 24, Youngvic.org
