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An Oak Tree

Five stars

The power of suggestion is everything in Tim Crouch’s remarkable construction, which draws its title from Michael Craig-Martin’s Michael Craig-Martin’s 1973 artwork, which put a glass of water on a gallery shelf and said it was an oak tree. Like Craig-Martin, Crouch asks his audience to have faith in order to find meaning in what follows. 

Crouch sets up a story where he plays a stage hypnotist who killed a twelve-year-old girl after he ran her over. A year later, the girl’s father visits the hypnotist’s show, and volunteers to join him on stage.

Rather than dramatise a naturalistic confrontation, Crouch invites a different actor who doesn’t know anything about the show to play opposite him, feeding them lines by through various means and effectively directing them. On the first Saturday of the run, Crouch’s foil was award winning star of Scotland’s stages, Nicole Cooper, Cooper was, as Crouch quite rightly pointed out, brilliant.

As too is Crouch’s revival of a show he first brought to Edinburgh in 2005, and which remains a mesmeric and at times emotional meditation on blind faith, loss, grief, transformation, and the belief in something beyond what we might think we’re seeing and what isn’t there. Like the hypnotist’s volunteers, the audience becomes complicit - or not - in an exercise fired by the imagination, but which transcends its meta-theatrical roots to become something both devastating and mind-expanding, making for an unmissable experience. 

Royal Lyceum Theatre until 27th August, 8.30pm.


The List, August 2023


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