Interview with Tim Crouch

An Oak Tree is completely unique. For each performance it requires a new second actor who hasn't read a word of the script until they start to perform it. For the audience it's a tantalising opportunity to see actors up close, vulnerable and completely out of their comfort zone. But noone could've predicted the enthusiasm for the concept amongst Hollywood's finest, whose eagerness to rise to Crouch's acting challenge seems to herald new hope for the future of theatre.

For the play's Brighton Festival run, Crouch had managed to find actors well respected within the industry, but not quite household names. Toby Jones has just won an award for his portrayal of Truman Capote in Infamous: at the time he went unrecognised as the voice of Harry Potter's house elf. Crouch kept schtum about the identity of his co-stars, who were only announced on the night.

In New York, An Oak Tree became the talk of the town.

Three-times Oscar nominee Joan Allen was so intrigued she returned to the stage for the first time in 17 years to perform in it. F Murray Abraham declared it a once in a lifetime experience and compared Crouch to Marlon Brando. Mike Meyers, heading for the stage with a head empty of lines, confessed he had always dreamt of such a moment. Going against Crouch's wishes, the producers placed an advert in the Time Out New York every week, revealing which second actor was doing which night.

Now piles of acting CVs and spotlight photos arrive daily from hopeful volunteers. Crouch replies with the words, "Great, thank you. CVs and photographs are just meaningless things for this show. I'm not looking for what you look like and I don't care what you've done. None of this matters." Because An Oak Tree will take an actor of any appearance or gender, and turn them into somebody else.

This remarkable piece of theatre - Crouch's second play for adults - won a Herald Angel at Edinburgh 2005, saw him scoop up the Best Actor award at last year's Brighton Festival, and has just returned from a three-month run Off Broadway to play at London's Soho Theatre. Here, the names of the second actors will not be publicised.

Couching themes of art, loss and human suggestibility in a vividly emotional and absurdly comic narrative, An Oak Tree has seen Crouch play opposite everyone from Dr Who's Christopher Eccleston and Only Fools And Horses's Roger Lloyd Pack to Frances McDormand, performance artist Laurie Anderson and Frasier's David Hyde Pierce.

Although he swears gently when I bring it up, many of the participating actors have described their theatrical onenight stand with Crouch as a life-changing experience and hailed him as a guru of their craft.

Right now he's sitting across from me at his kitchen table in Elm Grove, drinking coffee to ward off his Press night hangover.

Using nothing but a row of empty seats on a bare stage to suggest the scenario, An Oak Tree is set in a room above a pub, where a stage hypnotist is dying on his arse. Ever since he ran over and killed a girl three months ago he has lost his power of suggestion, and tonight nine of his volunteers are returned to their seats in the audience. The tenth, however, appears to be doing everything the hypnotist tells him to.

Three months ago this man lost his daughter in a car accident, responding to the loss by imagining that she has become the oak tree next to the spot where she died. He has come to the hypnotism act looking for answers.

The inspiration for An Oak Tree was Michael Craig- Martin's 1973 work of the same name, in which the artist asserts that a glass of water sitting on a shelf is actually an oak tree. The outcome is a bold experiment in theatre form: while Crouch always plays the hypnotist, every night the part of the father is played by a different actor who knows nothing about the show prior to curtain-up and receives instructions as the play goes along.

"There's a nice play between the father volunteering for the act and the second actor volunteering for my show,"

explains Crouch, who devised the piece with the help of directors Karl James and the artist known as a smith.

"Someone who has lost their compass in life is played by an actor who has lost their compass on stage. We always said if it felt like just a trick we'd ditch it. But the story is better told because there is someone in it who doesn't know what's going to happen next."

Although they always play a 46-year old father who is six foot two and has a bloodshot eye, the second actor may be a man or a woman, big or slight, of any age and colour. All Crouch asks is that the second actor be happy to sight read and wear an ear-piece for some of the show. They must also be willing to trust in him wholeheartedly - placing them, as he observes, in "a very similar level of release as would be found in a stage hypnotism act".

Meeting up with each volunteer an hour before the show, Crouch works to allay any anxieties about practical matters and issues one vital invitation: "Come and be open on stage".

One of the American actors who responded most fully to this opportunity was Frances McDormand, the four-times Academy Award nominee who won the Best Actress award for her performance as Marge Gunderson in Fargo. She appeared with Crouch in November during his ten-week run Off Broadway.

"America's full of ideas of fame and shallowness and superficiality," says Crouch. "Frances McDormand lives in a house with no TV and is as normal and human as anything. She was completely fearless and not afraid of making a fool of herself. She knew that thing of I'm going to reveal myself' is not something to be embarrassed about, it's actually something to be really straight with."

McDormand did things that no second actor had done before. She flicked Crouch's hypnotist a V sign and, when asked to imagine herself on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall, she played piano with her feet. Crouch found himself "bumped onto a completely different path, not only practically on the stage but emotionally in the piece".

Afterwards, McDormand introduced Crouch to her husband, Joel Coen, and his brother Ethan, who had both loved the play and took him for a drink. "It was," confesses Crouch, "a life moment". McDormand recently emailed, comparing the intensity of the Oak Tree experience to injecting theatre straight into her veins.

"Some actors take complete ownership of the piece," says Crouch. "Others have been a bit like rabbits in the headlights and I've spent the whole show working hard to loosen them up. Some performers have worked so well that I've been moved to tears. Some actors have laughed their way through the show."

David Hyde Pierce, who played brother Niles in hit US sitcom Frasier, was predictably sharp and quick-witted and bit into the comic moments with relish. So too did Mike Myers, one of the world's most popular character comics, who flung the audience subtle sideways glances and curtseyed through his curtain call.

"He told me he has dreams in which he has to go on stage without having prepared anything," laughs Crouch. "For most people they'd be nightmares, but in his dreams he's fantastic and everyone loves him."

Maura Tierny, better known as Abby in ER, treated the show as a private challenge and brought no friends or family to support her. Lili Taylor, star of High Fidelity and Six Feet Under, put an unusually star-struck Crouch at his ease by arriving with no make-up and nerves to match his own.

Most touching of all was Joan Allen, who is currently filming the sequel to The Bourne Supremacy but hadn't set foot on stage since Burn This with John Malkovich 17 years before. Having heard about the show while chatting to a producer at her gym, it was Allen who approached Crouch.

"She wanted to do the play but was worried about the size the print in the script would be," he recalls.

"So I send an email to Joan with a special document called Oak Tree Fonts. I say, The font will never be smaller than this. Sometimes it's THIS BIG! But mostly it's this.' And she emails back in really massive letters saying, HOORAY!'"

It is Crouch's cosy approach to such practical matters, coupled with a luminous confidence on stage, that transforms An Oak Tree from an awkward exercise in detachment and alienation into something emotionally compelling and infinitely human.

"I tell the actor before the show that one of the things I will use the ear phones for is to tell them how great they are," explains Crouch. "I tell them some of that praise will be scripted and all of that praise will be meant. So I spend a lot of the show whispering, beautiful, lovely, f****** great'."

They might have known it was coming, but Christopher Eccleston and David Morrissey, two television actors returning apprehensively to the stage, were both visibly bolstered by such praise. In America, with its culture of therapy and self-help, many of the actors found themselves responding to Tim's affability, at once natural and scripted, on a more spiritual level. Some compared the experience to freefalling, with Crouch as the crash net, others referred to his "zen-like" manner and "generous soul".

Rachel Fowler interacted so instinctively that her husband, sitting in the audience, thought she really had been hypnotized.

Opening the Soho run last week, Patterson Joseph, a comic actor familiar from The Mitchell & Webb Look and Green Wing, was moved to thank Crouch for "the gift, the gift of your play".

"It's like, woah there!" laughs Crouch at all this talk of self-discovery. "The intention was never to give anyone that kind of overwhelming experience. The intention was to make a piece of theatre."

The crux of An Oak Tree is Crouch's humane honesty about the artifice of theatre, which he traces back to a production of Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic. It was a good production, he says, with Ian Glen as the lead, but that's not why it sticks in his mind. It sticks in his mind because, five minutes into Act One, just as the ghost of Hamlet's father was appearing, an old woman two seats along slumped forward and wet herself.

Thinking she had died, Crouch and some other audience members set about carrying what they thought was a corpse out of the auditorium. But despite the real-life tragedy apparently unfolding in the stalls, the play carried on. Above all the grunting and the heaving and the smell of urine coming from row ten, Hamlet's father's ghost continued to haunt the battlements as if nothing had happened.

The woman, it turned out, had slipped into a diabetic coma from which she soon recovered.

Crouch's relationship with traditional theatre had suffered more permanent damage.

"How could a supposedly live art form be so callously unresponsive to its audience?" he asks, still appalled by the incident. "We're all in the same space, and yet I think there's been this power imbalance between the actors and the audience, who sit in the dark and are told, Shut the f*** up, we are actors, we've rehearsed this, we know what we're doing, and we're going to deal with truth now. Shut the f*** up because we're doing truth'."

Years later, when Crouch came to write his first play, My Arm, he knew it must be open enough to acknowledge the vagaries of reality.

At a Tim Crouch show you will never be picked on or humiliated, but he might wish you a good evening. He may even offer a brief summary of the action for anyone arriving late. And, if you look like you're not feeling too well, he will probably check to see if you're OK.

Since 2003, when My Arm debuted at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, Crouch has been hailed as one of the most exciting experimental theatre-makers working in the English language. If there's a founding principle to the way his plays are presented it is that the less you give an audience, the more they will go with it. His fundamental instinct is to ensure that the story, however much it may be interrupted, dismantled and exposed as fiction, always remains key.

Brighton audiences may know Crouch through the one-man Shakespeare trilogy Fairy Monster Ghost, commissioned by the Brighton Festival for younger audiences and designed by Shockheaded Peter's Graeme Gilmour. In I, Caliban, Crouch retold The Tempest from the point of view of Prospero's slave. In I, Banquo, he conjured M a c b e t h ' s murdered best mate with the help of a heavy-metal guitar soundtrack and 32 litres of blood. And his refusal to dilute Shakespeare's emotional world or patronise his audience led to controversy in 2004 when one school took exception to I Peaseblossom's raunchy innuendo.

Although written more for adults, My Arm shares the Shakespeare trilogy's elements of gamesplay, as objects taken from the audience come to represent family members in a simple yet beautifully-written tale of domestic life gone awry.

Crouch plays a man who, at the age of ten and for want of anything more meaningful to do, decided to raise his arm above his head and keep it there. Thirty years on he has become a celebrated medical specimen and an icon of the New York art scene, but he has also torn his family apart for the sake of an empty gesture. Crouch still performs this charming yet soul-wrenching monologue, which you can see at London's Soho Theatre on Tuesday, February 20.

"I wrote My Arm at a point when my acting career had sunk really low," says Crouch, who is now Education Associate at the National Theatre, associate artist at New York's Franklin Stage Company and writer in residence at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, Germany.

In the Eighties he had read drama at Bristol University, where he met his wife Julia Collins and co-founded the acclaimed Public Parts Theatre. In 1997 he had worked and found inspiration from acclaimed post-modern playwright Caryl Churchill, known for her non-realistic techniques, while playing Oliver Cromwell at The National in her play Light Shining In Buckinghamshire.

Six years later, inexplicably, he was jobbing in a naff Sky soap called Mile High.

"Oh f****** hell," he remembers. "I sunk really low. It was about a saucy airline called Fresh Air and for six episodes I was Captain Richard Beardsley. It was terrible. While we were filming in Majorca I spent all my time writing My Arm. It was a feeling of, Just let me express myself!', and also a feeling that by the time I was 40 I had to finish something.

And thank God I did because My Arm sealed a voice for me that was not like anybody else's.

You think of acting as an expressive form but, by and large, it's an interpretative one. As an actor you're a translator - I started wanting to speak in my own language."

Even in casual conversation, Crouch's speech is full of poignant, comic and at times unexpected emphases that make his simplest observations seem authoritative and rather fascinating. I'm surprised, I tell him, how much his rhythms and inflections mirror the style of his writing. "Quite right," he shoots back, apparently thoroughly aware of the singular presence of his voice. "Damn right."

An Oak Tree, Crouch tells me, was also written in response to his frustrations as an actor, in particular the emphasis on realism. In every play, he points out, there is a set of instructions - it's called the script. As a jobbing actor he spent weeks trying "to find myself" in relation to those instructions so that his speech and actions would appear, to the audience, spontaneous.

In An Oak Tree it's the same process, only it happens instantaneously and the audience can still see a trace of the instructions. The magic is that, despite the visibility of the mechanism, you still feel incredibly moved.

"I like to think that there's a challenge being laid down within the play about what acting is," he says. "The future of theatre is not in realism, because TV and film do that beautifully. The future of theatre, as modern technology takes over, will have to be about finding the essence of the live relationship.

And that is what this show is all about."

At the heart of An Oak Tree is a fascinating connection between the operations of hypnotism and theatre, as both encourage us to believe in things that are manifestly untrue. The audience of a play, in Crouch's opinion, is essentially in a low-grade trance.

"I am not Hamlet!" he cries in illustration.

"This is not really Denmark!"

In June, Crouch is going to Rome to see an Italian production of An Oak Tree.

The precedents for other companies performing his work are not good. In Venezuela, An Oak Tree appeared as Mi Mundo Hipnotico with an unspeakably tacky poster suggesting a cheap hypnotism act. He still can't bring himself to talk about a Zurich production of My Arm in which the German actor performed the entire play with his arm painted black and strung above his head.

But Crouch, who is currently working on a new commission to be performed in an Edinburgh gallery, knows it's important to move on. His plays are like conjoined twins, he says, and though the separation process is a painful and risky one, it's more realistic in the long term.

More importantly, An Oak Tree is all about inviting another actor to come and bend his writing to their will. Wouldn't he be betraying his principles if he started dictating how his work should be staged?

There is one other consideration: if An Oak Tree is to be seen by the wider audience it deserves then Crouch himself, however unthinkable this might be, cannot always be in it.

"Doing An Oak Tree is like the first day of rehearsal, then the first night, and then the last night party, all in the space of two hours,"

says Crouch, who has now performed the play with nearly 200 different actors, and still makes a point of buying each a post-show drink. "It's not boring for a second, but it's psychologically exhausting. It's like I'm having affair after affair after affair.

Sometimes I'd just like to settle down in marriage."

• An Oak Tree is at the Soho Theatre, London, until March 4. You can also see My Arm at the theatre for one night only on Tuesday, February 20. Call 0870 4296883 to book.

For more information about the work of Tim Crouch visit www.newsfromnowhere.net