Bottoms, S. (2009) Authorizing the Audience: The conceptual drama of Tim Crouch. Performance Research, 14(1) 65-76.

Tim Crouch performing An Oak Tree at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, August 2005. Jon Spooner plays the second performer.

• “One review of An Oak Tree also pointed up the specifically theatrical nature of its juxtaposition of material objects and scripted dialogue: ‘Craig-Martin has spent all bravado of invention on his sparsely decorated stage set. Similar originality in the dialogue is all but missing’. Thirty-two years later, British actor-playwright Tim Crouch premiered An Oak Tree, a play directly inspired by Craig-Martin’s work.” (65)
• “Dawn’s passionate insistence on this material reality is somewhat undermined by the fact that her lines are performed by Crouch himself, standing there in the garb of the stage hypnotist character that he plays through most of the piece: the tree s/he gestures at is a piano stool, the road a bare stage floor, and the daughter a plasticseated chair that Crouch holds cradled under his arm.” (65)
• “it is the yawning gaps between signifiers and signifieds that somehow function to bring home the traumatic disorientation experienced by the Father.” (66)
• “This ‘ungluing’ and exposure of drama’s composite representational elements is clearly central to the workings of An Oak Tree, which explicitly presents a series of ‘layers’, or dramatic frames, superimposed over one another.” (66)
• “The spectators are cast as ‘characters’ in the play but simultaneously reminded of their non-coincidence with the spectators they represent – just as they remain conscious that the second actor is noncoincidental with the character s/he is asked to portray.” (66)
• “As the play progresses, the layering of ‘actual’ and ‘fictional’ people and space is further complicated by other factors. For example, the actor playing the Father is also asked to play the character of ‘the actor playing the Father’: that is, Crouch provides him/her with scripted dialogue for brief scenes in which they ‘break’ from their characters and just ‘act themselves’.” (66)
• “the Father character also steps beyond the representational frame of the pub scene, by conjuring up memory scenes – at home, or on the street – in which Crouch is cast as Dawn.” (67)
• “Crouch’s plays further trouble the already troubled distinction because their ‘ungluing’ of representational elements contributes centrally to his creation of compelling dramatic narratives, rather than functioning to undermine ‘the dramatic paradigm’.”(67)
• “Viewed in these terms, Crouch’s work offers a powerful reinvigoration of dramatic traditions rather than a step ‘beyond’ them.” (67)
• “far from veiling the material mechanisms of theatricality, Crouch makes his audience conscious of their own process of spectatorial meaning-seeking, by showing them – dramatising? – the theatrical process whereby the second actor (effectively the spectator’s surrogate) is interpolated into the play” (68)
• “As the piece progresses, the initially disorientated second actor can be seen gradually to get his or her bearings and to begin responding and performing ‘in role’. My own experience of watching the play for the first time was that the orientation process undergone by the second actor (on that occasion, Brigid Forsyth) acted as a kind of proxy for my own mental negotiation of, and mounting engagement with, both the play and the performance. One could hardly wish for a clearer refutation of Lehmann’s contention that ‘if texts and staged processes are perceived according to the model of suspenseful dramatic action, the theatrical conditions of perception, namely the aesthetic qualities of theatre as theatre, fade into the background’.” (68)

My notes:

• An Oak Tree comes out of a postdramatic dramaturgy already contained within Craig-Martin’s artwork, which preceded and influenced it
• AN OAK TREE – Material reality undermined, poststructuralist/postdramatic idea
• The second actor doesn’t know what he’s playing, he is given instructions etc. – no emotional basis to character