Simon Stone's Yerma

“My son.

My daughter.

You’re not coming to me.

But I’m coming to you.

I’m coming.”

Proper spoilers within.

To anyone familiar with his work, one of the most obvious aspects of his earth-shatteringly good production of Yerma for the Young Vic will be the fact that it acts almost as an amalgamation of his other productions. We’ve got the glass walls of his Wild Duck and the scene titles / traverse from Thyestes for the Belvoir, the mud and dirt of his Medea along with the rain from his Husbands and Wives for the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Even the grass covering the floor of the stage for certain scenes seems plucked from his Cherry Orchard for Melbourne Theatre Company. Yet Yerma feels absolutely, 100% fresh and original.

From it you wouldn’t get the impression that Simon Stone is an Australian director who works mainly in Europe. This is his most British production – not in the fact that it seems like a British piece of theatre, but that it’s set absolutely in modern day London. It’s insane. Stone makes so many cultural comments about British society that you’d think he’d lived here his whole life. I’m inclined to call his adaptation that best British play of the year so far. To get a play which was written in 1934 speak to explicitly to *us* and *our society* does Lorca more justice than a line-by-line translation.

The piece starts with the lights dimming to this beautiful, almost angelic choir. On two screens above the stage – technically four screens, it’s played on a glass-walled traverse -- the words “YERMA, AFTER LORCA” appear. (On a side note, it’s proper class to see an author actually get credited *in* a production instead of just getting a few paragraphs in a crappy programme.) We then get the chapter number, scene number, scene title.

The first scene makes the realistic nature abundantly clear: a young couple, Her (played by Billie Piper) and John (played by Brendan Cowell) have just bought a three floor house in a gentrified area of London. We never find out where the house is, but it seems somewhere like Southwark or even Islington, the sort of place where you actively want to raise a child. The acting here walks brilliantly the line between realistic naturalism and unrealistic naturalism. It isn’t naturalistic in the Richard Eyre sense, where the acting is so obvious in attempting to appear naturalistic that is fails completely, but it isn’t naturalistic in the Katie Mitchell sense either. Instead, it’s just a perfectly happy couple eating pizza, drinking wine and making jokes about Sadiq Khan vs Boris Johnson, IKEA furniture and anal sex. And thinking about filling the house with children turns into planning. But what’s brilliant is that even here, in this scene of domestic bliss, Stone starts to suggest that maybe, just maybe, this couple aren’t compatible . Her has discovered pornography on John’s laptop, and while it’s all very joking you get the very clear impression that neither party is wholly at ease. When she makes a jab about coming on his  if she had a dick his face squirms.  But it’s realistic for both actor and audience. This is a couple who we see everyday walking down the street, holding hands, planning where they’ll go for lunch. The later scenes of so devastating because they warp what we see on a near constant basis.

Then, as at the end of every scene, the lights abruptly dim, mid-sentence, the screens tell us we’ve skipped a few days and that Her is going to tell her family. In the space of a few seconds, the pizza and wine of the first scene have been cleaned and the space is now littered with cardboard boxes. It makes you gasp – the stage management here is absolutely exemplary. At one point, the lights go down and raise to reveal that the floor is now covered in grass, and there’s a little tree being planted. We later see the same tree only this time it’s withered, the leaves dead with Her slumped against it. Like the tree, her womb has no life.

And what makes the story even more tragic is that it seems everyone else is getting pregnant. Her’s sister, Mary (Charlotte Randle) is stuck in an unhappy marriage with a husband who can’t keep his cock away, yet finds herself pregnant on a yearly basis. She’s postnatally depressed. When she asks Her if she wants the baby, she’s only half-joking. Their distant mother, Helen (Maureen Beattie) doesn’t really give two shits about her kids and is more interested in her job. Even John doesn’t care too much. Sure, he wants kids – but not in the same way his wife does.

In the programme notes, Stone speaks of a wish to “elevate [Lorca] to the ranks of mythmaker”, which I assume means in the sense of contemporary staging of ‘classic’ (read: old) plays. His staging strips Lorca to the bone. When we think of productions of his work, we think of women in ankle-length dresses dragging baskets and sowing, and men in in caps with moustaches stomping around all played in a perfect recreation of a 1930s Spanish farmhouse. Yet Stone drags the play away from the original social context and into, as was his intention, the realm of myth by adapting the script freely. Here, Yerma is no longer a farmer’s wife but a lifestyle blogger and magazine editor, and her husband works for some City firm. They drink organic fruit smoothies and shop in Marks and Spencer. And Stone then uses these modern updates to fuel the story. Towards the end, when they decide to go ahead and try IVF, the relationship is put under even more strain as he has to start working even more to cover the costs while his credit card is being declined in the supermarket. It’s fucking devastating. You have absolute pity for these characters because, fundamentally, they’re good people. The original is set in a society which is wholly and completely misogynist, and when Yerma kills her husband you have to respect her even. Yet Stone makes it possible to relate to every one of *his* characters. We see that Her is so focused on having children that she ruins her personal relationships, but also that she’s completely allowed to want children that desperately. We also see that John is a bit of a twat but also that he legitimately wants what’s best for Her as he cooks up avocado on toast because it’s her favourite breakfast.

And the scene where she kills herself. Fuck. I saw Cleansed without fainting and found this tough to watch. We get a blackout of a few seconds, then see Her using the glass walls of the set to push this knife into her womb. Blood is running down her legs and covering the glass. She collapses on the ground, sobs, and pushes the knife in even further. Says some things. Then we cut to black. We don’t know if she lives or dies, though the implication is pretty bleak. Maybe she killed her husband – the last we see of him is Her forcing him into the corner with the knife. The audience were silent. I wasn’t really sure whether to clap or cry.

It was scenes like that where Lizzie Clachan’s beautiful set really came into its own. It’s easy to drop the Brechtian verfremdungseffekt bomb on it but that’s what it was. By physically cutting us off from the actors Stone makes the whole thing feel so intense and awful. Anything can happen because they’re in a different room to us. And I’m not normally a fan of things like mud on stage, but the glass stopped it being too much of a distraction and using it meant the Glastonbury scenes were even more weird and disjointed. Her crawling around in the mud, looking for someone to fuck her so she can get pregnant worked so well on a physical / symbolic level: here is someone reduced to animal status in her desperation to have a child.

The set is also interesting because it completely dictates the way in which we view the production. Whether we want to or not we are absolutely forced to take a side. By slicing the Young Vic’s auditorium in half and enclosing the traverse stage with glass walls Clachan ensures that our perspective of the events is controlled not by simply “where we chose a seat while hoping the director has sympathy on us”, but instead directed by Stone creating a show which feels utterly real and controlled not by a need to cater to the desires of an audience but the desires of the show itself. That sounded confusing, and it’s a fucking mess of a sentence, but it’s the only way I can summarise the effect of the set on us. I’ll use the final scene of the play as an example: I only saw Her use the walls of the set to push the knife into her womb because that’s where I was sat. Similarly, I didn’t see her push the knife further in to her after she collapsed as she was against the glass facing away from me, while the people across from me did.

It’s also interesting that in Stone’s adaptation Yerma kills herself while the fate of the husband is left more vague. Instead of strangling him to death and then going even madder, we get a sudden cut to black as she forces him into the corner. Lights up, he’s vanished and she’s pacing furiously and sobbing. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t – it was never the husband’s story to begin with.

The acting is fucking phenomenal. Every performance is top-notch which makes it difficult to single one out to attempt analysis on. Not much more to say really. Piper is utterly crushing, I’m sure awards will beckon for her and they’re wholly deserved. It’d also be nice to see Brendan Cowell get best actor for something, although he’ll probably get relegated to best supporting. Screw that.

So yeah. Basically see this. It’s completely sold out now, but if you can brave the returns queue then you absolutely have to. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen in a British theatre. If it doesn’t transfer to the West End, then I can easily see this getting revived at the Toneelgroep Amsterdam or the Schauspielhaus. I’m sure Ivo Van Hove has already sorted something out. It has the fuck-it-all attidue of a young Thomas Ostermeier with the droning guitar strums that play throughout the final chapter.

A lá Cleansed, I’m convinced that we’re finally going somewhere. In five years time British theatre might not be so shit if we carry on making productions like this. Leaving the theatre and realising I’m in London and not Amsterdam, or Berlin, or a European country which knows what theatre actually is was one of the best feelings I’ve had in ages. 

Christ. 

Katie Mitchell's Cleansed

"All I want is a room with a view
A sight worth seeing, a vision of you
All I want is a room with view.
I will give you my finest hour
The one I spent watching you shower
I will give you my finest hour, oh yeah"

Blondie, "Picture This"

When discussing a piece of theatre, it seems logical to begin by discussing the piece of theatre itself. 

This is not one of those discussions, because this is a piece of theatre directed by Katie Mitchell - and there are few directors working today who are burdened with suitcase after suitcase of useless critical baggage like she is. Her naturalistic productions of Chekhov, Euripides and other writers at the National were divisive, and her multimedia productions (which fused live performance with technology to create what she called "live cinema") were practically groundbreaking. In the years following however Mitchell quietly disappeared, instead working in Europe at theatres like the Schaubühne where she felt she could create her most radical, extreme and feminist productions. 

So her production of Sarah Kane's Cleansed  is quite a big deal. Not only does mark the National Theatre of Great Britain staging a play by one of the best playwrights in Great British history for the first time - I never quite believed this, yet somehow it seems that even our biggest theatre is capable of committing such an injustice - it marks something of a homecoming for Mitchell herself - an institution whose misogyny caused her to leave it.

The play itself follows various figures attempting to survive in some kind of bizarre torture institution. We have Grace, who has come to look for her dead brother Graham, and then Road and Carl, a young gay couple being tortured to test their love, and then Tinker, a psychopathic dealer/doctor who craves the love of a peep-show dancer yet doesn't know how to feel love.

While the use of a university setting was clearly the intention of Kane, Mitchell instead opts for a psychiatric institution which, due to abandonment or other reasons, has been overrun by dirt and trees, gorgeously summarizing the clash between love and hate Kane portrays. It's a beautiful design by Alex Eales. Not because it's aesthetically pleasing in the way an Ivo Van Hove production is, say, but because it's just so realistic. What he and Mitchell have done is create a small slither of a fully-realised world, and it just so happens that the slither they chose was one where such horrific, atrocious things happen. The lighting by Jack Knowles is also top marks: dark enough that this place seems like hell, but bright enough that we can see every act of mutilation crystal clear.

It's this idea of a *fully realised* world that brings me to the performances, which are some of the most un-naturalistic yet naturalistic performances I've seen. Like her production of Alles Weitere Kennen Sie Aus Dem Kino at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Mitchell has the characters perform their lines under duress, with Tinker and his attendants being an inescapable force who are often present even in the scenes the text says they aren't. Dialogue is sparse, and it's interesting to note just how little of it there is full stop. Words just sort of crop up in the haunting soundscape (sound design by Melanie Wilson and music by Paul Clark) which mixes helicopters passing overhead with ghostly replayings of lines screamed by the characters. When there are exchanges, the characters speak fast because they know they could be dead in a few minutes. All of the performances are fantastic, but Michelle Terry (on-stage the whole time, often fully nude for long stretches of it) is once again proving to us all that she's one of the best actresses working today. Her performance is worth the cost of admission alone, if I'm happily honest. And this is a demanding play, especially on Peter Hobday as the tortured Carl. Over the course of the play he has his tongue pulled out, and then his fingers and toes shredded. 

And the violence itself is disgusting. Realistic enough that it seems to be plausible, but not realistic enough that it distracts (like the working taps in Othello a few years back). When Carl has a large metal pole pushed up his anus, we see the pole lubricated and a small cardboard tray placed beneath him to catch any droppings. It's this horrendous attention to detail that just makes you squirm, and yet you can't look away because the world Mitchell presents is just so beautiful even in the moments of torture. On a personal note, the scene I found toughest to watch (after the needle being put into the eyeball) was the scene where Robin is force-fed an entire box of chocolates he bought as a present for Grace. This was the weaponisation of romance, affection as a noose. 

But the thing I loved most* about the production was how completely and utterly un-British it was. This is the kind of frightening, shocking yet ultimately moving work that just wouldn't be made under the National's previous artistic director, Nicholas Hytner. It was incredible to watch Cleansed and then step outside into the chilly London night. If this marks the start of the National producing more challenging work that will - one day - put us in the same league artistically as theatres in Germany and the rest of Europe, then this really is a significant production. Not that is isn't significant without all the contextual baggage about our relationship with Europe - it's pretty much a flawless production in every regard. It's one of the few pieces of theatre (re: Oresteia) that I've become utterly and completely *lost* in. The sum experience, the emotions that emerge organically from every single individual reaction it causes are so overwhelming and powerful. It's relentless in both horror and love, so uncompromising in the message it blasts into the head of anyone who watches it. 

And hearing a song by Blondie in a National Theatre production put a big fucking grin on my face: 

* I didn't, actually. I loved everything about it.

THAT Hamlet at the Barbican (Or, I Was Wrong)

I'll come out and say it loud and clear before we go one word further: I was not a big fan of Benedict Cumberbatch. Yes, I enjoy Sherlock. Yes, I enjoyed him the in The Imitation Game. He seemed like the kind of theatre actor who'd be good in modern plays but would struggle to do justice to one of Shakespeare's greatest characters. The fact of the matter is, I got a ticket to see the fastest selling theatre production of all time simply because it was Hamlet, and simply because it was directed by Lydnsey Turner. As the big day (I took to calling it B-Day seeing as we booked the tickets 14 months in advance), I quickly began to worry that all I'd done was pay a lot of money into a commercial monstrosity in which profit was placed before art. 

And from the moment I walked into the Barbican (cold and concrete, but difficult to dislike), it seemed that I was correct. Especially for Hamlet there were mugs, notebooks, bags and a myriad selection of tat and collectibles that were all wildly overpriced but bound to be snapped up by keen fans. I couldn't help but feel a twang of regret as I paid for my £8.50 programme, and the fact that it was marketed as a 'souvenir collector's item' didn't really make the financial damage any less painful. 

I also got the distinct impression that the powers-that-be at the Barbican were doing all they could to hype up the importance of the production. We'd all been told to bring photo ID else we'd be banned from entering, and were also constantly reminded not to take any pictures inside the theatre. Yes, they made us turn our phones off outside the actual auditorium so we couldn't take pictures of the Barbican's safety curtain, pictures of which are easily accessible on Google. This sounds annoying, and it was, but it was all worth it due to one simple thing: atmosphere. 

I've never been in a theatre when there's been such a buzz, such a spark of anticipation in the air. Even in the Barbican's large 1156 seat theatre, everyone was connected by a sense of childlike excitement that I've never really experienced inside a theatre before. When a voice told us that the performance would begin in one minute even I felt my pulse start to race a little bit, and everyone started to speak a little bit louder, a little bit quicker, until the opening of Nat King Cole's Nature Boy pierced the chatter like a knife and everyone fell silent. 

And there he is. Benedict Cumberbatch, every fiber of his being completely and utterly in role, even down to the tears trickling down his cheeks. I realised just how wrong I'd been. 

And three hours later I realised just how wrong the reviews had been. This is an exhilarating production, with a great beast of a play staged as a taut political thriller which grips you by the throat and never lets go until the fade to black 180 minutes later. It was my second time watching the play, and even I found myself wondering whether or not Hamlet would escape the inevitability of his death. Yes, it's a messy, cluttered production. But it's a messy, cluttered play. From Es Devlin's massive set to Jon Hopkin's gorgeous electronic score which fuses pianos and synths brilliantly. Turner has also trimmed the fat off play considerably, and a lot of the minor, supporting characters only speak their most important lines to keep the focus firmly on the central characters. And unlike quite a few critics, I liked the slight reshuffling of the first act. 

Every single one of the cast gave stellar performances, and I especially enjoyed Ciarán Hinds as a slimy, manipulative Claudius and Anastasia Hille as a power hungry Gertrude who by the end seems resigned to death. I also liked the little hint at her being a bit more involved in Ophelia's death than she initially claims.

This was one of those rare productions which left me both elated and shattered. It's Shakespeare for 2015: it's raw, focused and energetic and I'm so, so happy I got to see it. I'm also very excited that for lots of young people, this will be their first introduction to Shakespeare. And what an introduction it will be. 

I don't normally review productions on this blog, but just for the record I give this one top marks. 5/5 or 10/10.

Hamlet will also be broadcast to cinemas through National Theatre Life. It's well worth catching it beamed on the night or through one of the encore screenings.

July in Theatre

This July was defined by four trips to see four very different plays. 

We kicked off the month with a trip to see Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree, which was in the National Theatre's Temporary Space. I've already written a lengthy post on just how much I loved it. But I'll just say it again: it's an incredible piece of theatre and is about to embark on a short tour. It's well worth getting to one of the venues to catch it. 

Then it was to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see the RSC's Othello, which left me disappointed in both the production and the director Iqbal Khan's seeming lack of trust in the play itself. It was full of annoying gimmicks; at one point a television was lowered and a scene was acted out over a live video link, but it was blatantly prerecorded. Cheek By Jowl's production of Ubu Roi is how you use multimedia, and the work of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam  also demonstrates a brilliant use of live video. The actors never stood still, they were always fussing about enacting mundane tasks like setting up wi-fi and changing items of scenery. Khan didn't seem to understand that this play is still so popular for a reason, that reason being that the language and characters are brilliant. Lucian Msamati was a very good Iago, but even his pantomime cackle at the end seemed cliche. The RSC'S Othello is an uninteresting reading of a brilliant play, which the elderly Stratford audience lap up, calling it 'radical' and 'out there'. It just left me feeling a bit cold and a bit numb from the three hour running time. 

Then it was to London's Donmar Warehouse to see Temple, a new play by Steve Waters about the Occupy movement and the action initiated against it by the City of London. The play was nice. It was a calm, measured production directed by Howard Davies, with a lovely, powerful performance from HRH Simon Russell Beale as the Dean. Sure, it's not going to change the ways we look at theatre as an artistic medium, but it was a well written, brilliantly acted piece which trusted the audience to answer the questions the play raised themselves. And SRB could be an underdog Olivier nominee. 

And finally, back to Stratford to see Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, directed by Justin Audibert. It was brilliant. And I'm not just saying that because the RSC has, on a whole, been a bit disappointing this year. It's a really brilliant production. Jasper Britton is hilarious as the titular Jew, Barabas, and it makes great use of the smaller Swan Theatre. There were some goregeous period costumes, and having the choric Machiavel appear in a Royal Marlowe Company t-shirt was a clever touch. Basically, if you see anything in the RSC's summer season, go and see The Jew of Malta.

I Didn't Like Antigone at the Barbican, But I Loved What It Had to Say About Us

When the Barbican announced that their production of Antigone, written by the ancient playwright Sophocles in a translation by Anne Carson and directed by the man-of-the-moment Ivo Van Hove, anticipation began for what was one of the hottest tickets of 2015. It was going to tour all over the world, and to top it off Juliette Binoche (making a return to the London stage) would play the lead role.

So it was all a bit awkward then, that when it opened people found the production to be quite different from what they were expecting. I was one of these people. I found the production to be slow and lacking in focus. I wouldn't have been surprised if, in the rehearsal room, Van Hove just told the actors to "move around a bit" and to "shout that line". It seemed loose and methodical, which is interesting when this is a play about a young woman defying the state to continue the cause of the gods, with two suicides and a government issued burial (whilst alive) all happening within the 90 minute run time. Although the use of Lou Reed's Heroin does deserve special mention: that's one powerful way to end a show, with that discordant lament to the 60s rocker lifestyle blaring as the chorus continue to, well, live. 

But as the days passed since I saw it, something began to grow inside the back of my mind. An idea, just a notion of something bigger. Which was weird, because I'd felt my eyes getting heavy when I was actually watching the production. After watching the filmed version of the production on BBC 4, it quickly began to dawn on me, however, just how wrong my thinking about the production was. It wasn't until I sat down to read the programme the following week that I began to appreciate just how bold and powerful Van Hove's reading of the play was, which is summarized in the form of an essay entitled The Unanswered Question - How to Get to the Dark Soul of Antigone.  For the rest of this post, I'll put Van Hove's notes in italics, complete with the Greek (as opposed to the traditional Latin) spellings this production employed. 

Antigone goes on a long, solitary road towards death. That's interesting. Does Van Hove feel Antigone is fully aware of the fact that she won't survive? Scene by scene, she cuts herself loose: from her sister, who won't help with her brother's burial; from Polyneikes (not sure I fully see this. It's Polyneikes who causes her to do what she does, right until the bitter end); from the love of her fiancé Haimon; from Kreon's policy; and, as an inevitable consequence, from society. This seems to suggest that Van Hove didn't approach the play as a political thriller in which the course of modern democracy is changed forever by the actions of one woman, but views it more as a structurally abstract death-note. When the political aspect is ignored, the play turns into one woman effectively preparing herself for death.

I also love Van Hove's idea that the blind prophet Tiresias acts almost as an anti-Chorus, saying what the actual Chorus are too afraid to: that Kreon is the cause of all of the problems in the play, and not Oedipus, nor Antigone, nor Polyneikes nor Eteokles. In Antigone, the chorus take the form of Kreon's advisers. Their status within the clear political hierarchy of Thebes stops them from fully speaking what they think.  

But the most powerful piece of Van Hove's writing comes at the end of his essay: Kreon's efforts to turn around his punishments come too late. By the end of the play his wife, Eurydike, and two sons are dead. Like Antigone, Kreon is 'alone on his insides.' Like many directors, Van Hove is aware of the fact that Kreon ends up in the same position as Antigone. He has lost everything, but has no choice but to keep moving forward into an uncertain future. He has been driven by a sincere ambition to turn Thebes, his beloved city, into a better place and has failed In every scene he is given the chance to adjust his law but he can't. His inflexibility leads to his downfall. The sums up the character of Kreon perfectly: he is a man with a clear sense of morals, and is someone who sticks to his own laws without hesitation, even rejecting Tiresias (and because of this the Gods) until he realises that the prophet actually speaks the truth. 

And then, finally, the kicker: Antigone develops from a play about a brutal war to a play about politics and public policies and ends as a play about the helplessness of humans, lost in the cosmos. It is a play about survival: not the survival of an individual or a family, but of a whole society, perhaps even the world. The play is ambivalent and dark, modern and mythical, leaving one with more questions than answers. This could be considered Van Hove's manifesto when approaching the play; to create a production which doesn't follow one woman, but to stage a production which explores the role of every individual in society. To Van Hove, Thebes isn't a city in ancient Greece, but a space metaphoric for every city ever, regardless of time or place. Van Hove was also influenced by the response to the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 being left in an open field for a week, an act which seemed to violate timeless laws of death and the ways through which we honour and respect it. Just like how the Western press criticised all involved with the bodies (until the Dutch government intervened and arranged a 100km funeral procession, almost like the honours bestowed onto Eteokles), Antigone defies Kreon to bury her brother. Van Hove placed the play in a world which was timeless yet grounded in the present, in which Antigone's defying of Kreon's edict is an act of both personal empowerment and political protest, almost akin to the Occupy protesters. And like the war in Iraq, Kreon ignored the advice of his people to avoid showing weakness to his citizens.

At the end of Antigone, the surviving characters are forced to accept that they have no choice but to keep moving forward blindly, past a devastating war and into whatever the future holds. In Anne Carson's translation, a member of the Chorus remarks to a sobbing Kreon: "That's the future, this is the present. You deal with the present." This becomes a parallel to us: we don't know what's coming, but we know what's happened. Wars, a recession, austerity. So we deal about the present, and wait to deal about the future when we're living through it. 

This took a while to write, and nearly all of it came from myself, although Van Hove's essay obviously formed the basis. However, the Guardian's article, Death Becomes Her: How Juliette Binoche and Ivo Van Hove Reinvented Antigone was very interesting and is easily available online, and having the production when it was broadcast of BBC 4 recorded also proved to be invaluable.

Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree or: How I Learned To Stop Caring and Just Watch

When I first booked tickets to see Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree at the National Theatre's Temporary space I didn't really know what I was going to see. I knew that Crouch wanted details of the piece to be kept deliberately secretive, and I knew that half of the cast changes every performance and hasn't read a word of the script until they step onto the stage in front of the audience. To be completely honest, my main reason for going was because I'd sat in front of Crouch when I saw Our Town at the Almeida Theatre last November and wanted to see him on stage.

I also knew that the cast was two people, including Crouch, and that the show was Kind of a Big Deal. It was Kind of a Big Deal in that this was the tenth anniversary revival after runs in London, New York and Los Angeles, and it was also Kind of a Big Deal because famous people have done it. People like Mike Meyers, Sophie Okendo and Frances McDormand. People that you tell your friends about over dinner. And tickets were £15, so even if it was awful, it was only £15 worth of awful.

So when we sat down in the theatre, the start of the show was indicated not by the dimming of the lights or a loud sound effect, but by Tim Crouch strolling onto the stage, completely out of character and saying hello, which we warily replied to.

"Hang on", I thought. "This is supposed to be experimental! Shouldn't he be contemporary dancing around the set to an unsettling ambient score, while we all try to figure what's actually going on? Maybe it'll start normal and get weirder."

I was wrong. An Oak Tree is a simple, raw piece of theatre. It's the complete antithesis of the stereotypical 'experimental' piece. There's no gimmicks. The other characters in the piece are played by white chairs. The script walks the line brilliantly between beautifully abstract and language so simple it could have been improvised on the spot.

But the thing that made me fall in love with An Oak Tree is that every performance is just so, so special. The inherently repetitious nature of theatre means that, even if you're in love with a production, you're always aware of the fact that what you're watching will happen again. And again. And again until closing night and then if the show gets a West End transfer the process just repeats itself.

Every performance of An Oak Tree, then is a completely individual performance. Even the cast lists could be seen as collectors items. I wondered why no programmes were being sold until I realised that it would be kind of of impossible to do so. On a side note though, I'd happily pay for a commemorative limited edition book on the play, a bit like what Punchdrunk just did with their book on The Drowned Man. It's this feeling of individuality which makes every performance of An Oak Tree so special. Because the second actor changes every performance, the bond between cast and audience ceases to exist after the cast take their bows. We can't look at pictures on the website to bring back memories, nor watch a trailer on Youtube. We just have in our heads what we saw with our eyes and listened to with our ears. I even felt my eyes getting a bit damp at one point, which has never happened to me in a theatre ever.

And as much I hate the word, An Oak Tree is defined by the metatheatrical. Crouch plays a hypnotist, who hypnotises a man whose daughter he killed in a car crash. But isn't that just theatre in itself? Aren't the actors on stage the magicians, and we the willing participants? We hand over our tickets, find our seats and wait to be amazed? The piece is so dense, so jam-packed with clues and puzzles that it would be impossible to analyse it in the theatre. You come to appreciate the language not for what it symbolizes, but for how it sounds. When Crouch halts the piece to ask the second actor how they're finding it, never have questions so mundane sounded so shattering. Even as the lines between author and performer start to blur, I've never felt so emotionally exposed as I was on that sunny Saturday afternoon in July. I've been wanting to write something about An Oak Tree since I first left the theatre, but words have just escaped. Only three weeks later can I speak about it in a vaguely coherent way.

Because, ultimately, An Oak Tree is a love letter to theatre. Crouch (who seems to know much more about theatre than any Oxbridge-educated director does) has constructed a tender, heartfelt piece about something which the government want to cut to oblivion. The play could be seen therefore as a piece of political protest, standing tall in the face of everything. But I think it's best to just appreciate An Oak Tree for what it is: two people transforming themselves before our very eyes, and as a result, the audience transforming with them.