Tim Crouch’s experimental play An Oak Tree is pure magic – and no two nights will ever be the same

It’s been 20 years since Tim Crouch’s experimental theatre landmark An Oak Tree first premiered, with hundreds of actors taking on the challenge over the decades, but this anniversary production still feels winningly tender and tentative, not authoritative. Each night, Crouch guides a different performer through a script they’ve never seen before. And as they stumble over unfamiliar lines, he performs a magic trick: transforming their real discomfort into the crackling tension between two characters bound together by grief and guilt.

On opening night at the Young Vic, it’s the wonderful Irish actor Jessie Buckley braving the stage, one of a formidably starry line-up that also includes Adjoa Andoh, David Tennant, Meera Syal and Russell Tovey. And no wonder: for these massive actors, it’s a test. A risk. A way of injecting liveness and spontaneity into careers running along smooth rails. Buckley feels especially exposed on stage, her visible pregnancy adding a level of vulnerability that’s countered by the confident way she throws herself into the part – she falls to her knees playing uproariously virtuoso air piano, and when Crouch says “Ain’t she beautiful?”, she waggles her tongue mock-lasciviously and caresses her rounded torso.

He’s in persona as a creepy stage hypnotist, dressed in a silvery waistcoat and playing naff disco muzak over his speakers. And she plays everyone else – all the audience members at his failing, faltering gig – and Andy, a middle-aged man whose daughter this fumbling entertainer seems to have accidentally killed.

Watching An Oak Tree is sometimes – often! – an uncomfortable, frustrating experience. More than once, Crouch’s words are inaudible over the sound of piped traffic noise: at other moments, he stutters, heightening the artificiality of this entertainer’s patter by not letting it feel suave or confident. “Are you OK? Say yes,” this weird, bald puppet-master instructs Buckley, who doesn’t have room to insert her own words into a script that takes her in increasingly uncomfortable directions. But then, grief takes control away, too.

Crouch’s most powerful writing comes when death stops haunting the edges of the play and crashes into its centre, instead, emotions collapsing into abstracts. “She spoke two concrete blocks in black... left them inside me to this day,” says Andy, remembering what it felt like to hear the worst possible news.

open image in gallery

There are so many unsettling layers here, as Crouch switches the mood, steers us joltingly from one version of reality to another. But the potential chilliness of Crouch’s formal experiment is subverted by Buckley’s bubbling warmth and impulsivity – her nervous laughter, steely controlled stare, or unexpected hug of total relief. On another night, with another performer, it will feel totally different. But it’ll stay evergreen, for the way it exposes theatre’s oldest tricks – the power plays, the charm, the liveness, the risk – and repurposes them into something jarring and new.