Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree at the Young Vic – review

“Are you ok? Say ‘yes’”. It’s been 20 years since Tim Crouch’s experimental two-hander was first performed – his second play in a body of work that would rewrite the possibilities of theatre – and this question-cum-demand is still as uncomfortable and irresistible as ever.

It’s been uttered by Crouch to almost 400 actors over the years, each of whom have joined him for just one performance, having never seen or read the play. As they step on stage, Crouch tells them that he will play a stage hypnotist who has accidentally killed a young girl. They will play Andy, the girl’s father, who has come to the hypnotist’s show in search of answers.

He readies them for 75 minutes of sight-reading and on-the-spot direction, tells them they can stop at any time, then, among his final reassurances, there it is: “Are you ok? Say ‘yes’”. And so begins this play’s intricate dance with authorship and freedom, reality and performance, and the slippery limits of materiality.

Like the Michael Craig-Martin artwork that inspired it, the play asks us whether one thing can become another simply because the artist says it is so. Andy believes an oak tree has become his dead daughter; can Crouch make us take the same leap, even as he runs to the bar mid-performance to get a glass of water for his castmate?

The actor taking on opening night is a shrewdly challenging choice. Jessie Buckley is not only not a six foot two man, she is also pregnant. As she strokes her bump, gestures that her bladder might not hold out, gets puffed out by a bout of energetic piano playing, thoughts about her freedom and comfort prickle. In sections about the death of Andy’s daughter, we wonder if her tears stem, at least in part, from thoughts about her own unborn child. And yet she is undeniably Andy. Even the peals of wild laughter that punctuate her performance seem to be both an actor’s response to a ludicrous gig, and the release valve of a man at sea with grief.

The parallels between an actor lost on stage and a man lost in mourning are just one of the play’s many masterstrokes. There’s also its nimbleness, as a sudden instruction from Crouch or a jarring EDM track drags us from the Young Vic to the hypnotist’s show, to the site of the fatal accident, and back again. There’s the uneasy comedy of the script’s more brazenly metatheatrical moments – when it forces Buckley to compliment Crouch’s performance, or has Crouch wondering aloud if the whole thing’s “a bit contrived”.

But perhaps the play’s biggest achievement is that its games, its layers of artifice, its big theatrical questions are never at the expense of the story but always in service to it. To this moving exploration of grief and guilt and how we can move through both.

At the beginning of the show, Buckley asks Crouch (as per the script) “How free am I?” and Crouch quips that everything is scripted “but apart from that…” The audience laughs but Crouch, having performed opposite everyone from Mike Myers to Frances McDormand to Peter Dinklage, knows what an actor can do with the space in between the lines. He has learnt to follow their instincts, to give them just the right amount of freedom. When he says “Are you ok? Say ‘yes’”, it’s because he knows that, with a little help from him, they will be far more than “ok.”