Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.\u201cDon\u2019t you think it\u2019s a bit contrived?\u201d asks Tim Crouch of his fellow performer towards the end of An Oak Tree. It draws a laugh. This extraordinary show is absolutely, extremely and very deliberately contrived: a slippery, shape-shifting duet that keeps changing the rules of engagement \u2014 with the material, with the premise, with the audience.\u00a0And yet. It\u2019s as intricately constructed as a Jenga tower, though the key to it is unpredictability: a different, unrehearsed guest artist appears every night. And what makes it such a potent piece 20 years on from its premiere, is that the playful artifice comes in the service of fundamental questions about theatre, about free will and about grief. Above all, it\u2019s an exploration of the devastating bewilderment of loss.The basic scenario is simple, albeit emotionally loaded: an encounter between two strangers \u2014 a stage hypnotist and Andy, a middle-aged man whose young daughter was killed in a road accident. The hypnotist was the driver. Since then both men\u2019s lives have disintegrated, certainties shattered by this one terrible moment. Now the father has sought out the hypnotist at one of his shows, a grubby affair above a pub, to try and release himself from this waking nightmare.But what\u2019s striking is the way Crouch handles the material, wrapping the themes of loss, control and dislocation into the structure. He plays the hypnotist every time, but his stage partner, fresh each night, has never seen the script (volunteers for this run include David Tennant, Indira Varma and Adjoa Andoh). Playing the father, they read lines from a clipboard, respond to Crouch\u2019s instructions, improvise reactions \u2014 behave, in short, as someone under hypnosis might. Or someone poleaxed by grief.\u00a0Rather than rehearse someone to play the father\u2019s bereavement, then, the show\u2019s shape reflects the disorientation \u2014 that feeling of being cast in a role in which you don\u2019t know what to do. How many of us have longed for someone to snap their fingers and tell us something wasn\u2019t real?On press night that bold soul was Jessie Buckley, feeling her way into the distress of her character and putting her superb emotional honesty at Crouch\u2019s disposal. The fact that Buckley is clearly pregnant only added another layer to the fragility of the situation: as she wiped away tears, you could feel the audience\u2019s concern.\u201cHow free am I?\u201d the actor asks near the beginning. It sounded genuine from Buckley \u2014 probably was \u2014 but in fact the line is scripted. It drives straight to the heart of the show\u2019s dance with the nature of theatre \u2014 the suspension of disbelief; the way artifice can reveal truth; the roles of the writer, director and actor in shaping understanding. But it\u2019s also a nagging philosophical question about the level of control any of us has and our need to find meaning.If it all sounds impossibly abstract, it\u2019s certainly a danger. But Crouch embraces that, raising questions about the show\u2019s validity and handling of this painful material, constantly drawing attention to his own manipulation of events. And what\u2019s really remarkable, and moving, is that, in the midst of it all, Buckley made us see a grieving father, sitting on the ground and telling us his daughter has become an oak tree. None of it is true, yet we understood her.\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606To May 24, youngvic.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.\u201cDon\u2019t you think it\u2019s a bit contrived?\u201d asks Tim Crouch of his fellow performer towards the end of An Oak Tree. It draws a laugh. This<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":305004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-305003","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":305005,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305003\/revisions\/305005"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}