Overview

An Oak Tree is a bold, absurdist, comic play for two actors - one of them different at each performance - about loss, suggestion and the power of the mind. This Student Edition is published with a commentary and notes by Seda Ilter, which explore Tim Crouch's notion of audience and their role in theatre; possibilities of transformation and the role of visual art in theatre; the implosion of the real and fictional; and the liminal dramaturgy of Crouch's plays; as well as how this experimental play works in performance. The edition also includes an interview with Tim Crouch, which sheds further light on his philosophy and process.

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9781350384767

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Reviews

It circles elegantly around ideas of presence and absence, the real and the representational, doubt and certainty, even time itself ... [It's] one of the shows that has changed our perceptions of what theatre might be ... It’s no dry experiment in form, but an unexpectedly emotional 70 minutes that questions how we perceive and interpret the world and deal with grief and absence ... Like a magician showing us how the trick is done, Crouch doesn’t diminish our belief in what we see, but enhances it. “Do you see nothing there?” asks Hamlet after seeing the ghost. An Oak Tree takes absence and magnifies it until we see the ghosts, too. * Guardian * A play about theatre, a magic trick, a laugh and a vivid experience of grief, and it spoils you for a while for other plays * Caryl Churchill, playwright * An Oak Tree..., a syllabus staple ... is full of ... optical illusions. Eventually reality and fiction start to entwine or fuse together ... It's not just arid academia, mind; not just theatre about theatre. An Oak Tree is just as concerned with grief and the whole thing's a metaphor for the way that an absence can have a real presence. It's loaded with feeling too ...Increasingly, Crouch's body of work - made in conjunction with his regular collaborators a. smith and Karl James - looks as influential as any in British theatre. He is the heir to Peter Brook and Simon McBurney: British theatre's magic circle. * Whatsonstage *

Author Information

Tim Crouch is a UK theatre artist based in Brighton. Since 2003, he was been writing plays in which he performs and takes responsibility for their production. Crouch works with a number of associates and collaborators to produce his writing. His work includes My Arm, An Oak Tree, ENGLAND and The Author. He also writes plays for children and occasionally works as a director. Seda Ilter is a lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She is the author of Mediatized Dramaturgy: The Evolution of Plays in the Media Age (Methuen Drama, 2021) and she works on theoretical and aesthetic implications of new technologies and mediatized culture in theatre, new writing and modes of textuality in contemporary performance and new dramaturgies.

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