Writer: Tim Crouch
Directors: Karl James, Andy Smith and Tim Crouch
More than 20 years since its first outing, Tim Crouch’s hugely influential multilayered slice of conceptual metatheatre still has the power to impress. The two-hander interrogates the nature of grieving, the construction of theatrical illusion, and the extraordinary transformation a performer can work in an audience by simply reading lines and doing what they are told.
Crouch plays a bullying, remorse-stricken stage hypnotist whose life and act have collapsed in the three months since he accidentally killed a girl called Claire in a car accident. “Welcome to my hypnotic world”, he tells his pub audience, fluffing his lines and punching down on those punters brave or stupid enough to volunteer to come on stage.
One such is 40-something Andy, Claire’s father. Much as if he were in a hypnotic trance, grief has led him to believe that an oak tree growing next to the crash site is his deceased daughter, somehow resurrected. “I need you to know it’s good news, Claire’s fine”, Andy tells his distraught wife in a flashback.
One might anticipate onstage conflict once the hypnotist and Andy learn their connection at the end of Act One. (Crouch breaks any last vestige of the fourth wall to tell us precisely where we are in the play). Instead, each, trapped in their own emotional prison, contrives to surface and share his trauma. Much like an audience, they set about creating meaning from a series of events over which they have precious little control.
Though the text is the same every night, the performance is not. Each iteration features Crouch and a different guest actor playing the father who has neither read the script nor seen the play before walking on stage. Crouch, a god-like auteur (with a strong line in therapy-speak) when out of character, delivers whispered lines and stage instructions into an earpiece, has his co-performer read from a script, or simply tells them what lines they might have said had they known them. The conceit lays bare the bones of theatre-making, examines how we buy into the fiction we see onstage, and asks us why we respond emotionally to such manifest artificiality.
The large number of drama students in the press night audience suggests that the actor’s response to the sight-unseen challenge is, at least for some, much of the piece’s appeal. Gwyneth Keyworth on press night delivers something approaching a masterclass: her ability to shed tears and find empathy for a character she knows little about makes for a powerful evening and a consummate demonstration of technical ability. One supposes a less skilled actor might struggle, making each evening something of a lottery. If you get lucky, you are in for an absolute treat.
Runs until 15 November 2026
See here for a list of future guest performers
