Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree has been around for 20 years and has been performed about 400 times and it still feels very experimental and rather weird in a good way.  It mucks about with time and space and identity while layering on multiple meta-theatrical elements that create an experience that is simultaneously engrossing and somewhat disorienting.

It’s written for Crouch and one other actor.  The schtick is that it’s a different actor every time and they haven’t seen a script or rehearsed at all.  Sometimes they have parts of a written script to work with, sometimes they carry out instructions from Crouch that the audience can hear and sometimes they are instructed via earbuds.  They have a lot of, sometimes, weird things to do.  Sunday night it was Qasim Khan’s turn in the hot seat.

The plot is superficially straightforward but rolls out in some fairly strange ways.  It’s set twelve months ahead of the performance date.  Tim is a low budget hypnotist doing shows in pubs, at weddings etc.  “Tonight” he’s doing a gig at a fairly grotty pub in South London.  Three months earlier (than the gig; so nine moths in the future) he was involved in an RTA in which he ran over and killed a twelve year old girl on her way to a piano lesson.  “Tonight” her father Andy is in the audience and is one of the audience who volunteers to be hypnotised though Tim doesn’t recognise him.

Since the accident Tim has lost any genuine powers he might have had and is used to finding comic excuses for why his subjects don’t “go under” so when Andy actually obeys him he assumes he’s taking the piss and gives him increasingly humiliating and disgusting tasks to do.  Even when he brings Andy out of hypnosis Andy believes these things actually happened.

As Tim starts to to grasp who Andy is they start to re-enact the accident but with Andy as Tim and Tim as the daughter (and Andy’s wife).  It gets even weirder with Andy convinced that a tree at the accident site is his daughter and the wife, Dawn, convinced that Andy has lost it.  And what about the timeline?  If all this happens in the future then what are they acting out?

It’s all played out in a very austere fashion with just a piano stool and some stacking chairs on stage.  There are lots of silences.  There’s music; “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana blasting out and a repeated, not quite accurately played, excerpt from the Goldbergs; presumably what the girl was listening to in her last moments.  Since Khan doesn’t know what’s coming next, the silences are especially tense.  And just where do we end up?  Summing up, t’s as experimental a piece as I have seen on a Toronto stage; comparable perhaps (though quite different) to work.text.  I found it fascinating and would happily see many more such experiments.  We don’t see enough of them.

Crouch and Khan are both amazing.  Of course, if you go see it it will be somebody else and I don’t know if the script changes if it’s a female actor.  Do they play the mother, Dawn, rather than Andy?  I don’t know.  Let me know in comments if you do go see it.

An Oak Tree continues at the Bluma Appel Theatre as part of Luminatio until June 22nd.