Writer: Tim Crouch
Directors: Tim Crouch, Karl James and Andy Smith
The title refers to the place marker where a girl, on her way to a piano lesson, stepped into the road and was killed by a car. The themes of grief and loss in the play mean it carries age guidance of 14 plus.
Surprisingly, though, this powerful storyline is not the most prominent aspect of Tim Crouch’s drama, which first premiered round the corner from the Lyceum, at the Traverse Theatre, in 2005.
The whole enterprise is built around something of a gimmick. Alongside Crouch himself, there’s a different second actor at each performance, who has never seen the play nor read the script.
In the sell-out performance I saw, the other actor was Archie Backhouse, whom Crouch introduced, saying he’d met him about an hour before the start of the show.
Does the play make use of the trained second actor’s improvisation skills? Hell, no! Well, maybe, just a tiny bit. Their every line, we’re told, is scripted. Towards the end of this performance, we glimpsed the veracity of that statement when Crouch was momentarily wrongfooted by Archie returning a compliment.
The rest of the time, Crouch prompts, coaches, cues and instructs his helper so thoroughly that the line between onstage and off, between performance and rehearsal, is completely eroded. There are pregnant pauses, covered by canned music, as Crouch communicates through a microphone connected to the second actor’s earphones.
A lot of the time, Crouch tells him the line to say, or hands him a clipboard with pages of script to read out. This laborious methodology privileges the audience, as we can see behind the artifice. If it becomes rather tiresome after a while, the show never loses its peculiar intrigue.
The action develops into an encounter between the driver of the car, who performs a tacky hypnosis show, and the dead girl’s father, who volunteers to take part in it.
Everything becomes quite disjointed at that point. The hypnotist is thrown by the father’s presence. His instructions and Crouch’s prompts to the second actor intermingle, creating a creepy and genuinely unsettling effect.
The underlying theme here is manipulation – of the second actor by Crouch, of the volunteers by the hypnotist, of the audience by the playwright. Overall, this is an exercise in form that reduces the content – or rather, the form becomes the content – with the core melodrama reduced to a sideshow. Does all of this work? I think the play succeeds on its own terms. But do see it and judge for yourself.
Runs until 27 August 2023 | Image: Contributed
