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Tim Crouch (born 18 March 1964) is a British experimental theatre maker, actor, writer and director. His plays include My Arm, An Oak Tree, ENGLAND, and The Author. These take various forms, but all reject theatrical conventions, especially realism, and invite the audience to help create the work. Interviewed in 2007, Crouch said, "Theatre in its purest form is a conceptual artform. It doesn't need sets, costumes and props, but exists inside an audience's head."Mark Fisher, 'Art of the Matter', Edinburgh List Magazine, August 2007
Stephen Bottoms, Professor of Contemporary Theatre & Performance at the University of Manchester, has written that Crouch's plays "make up one of the most important bodies of English-language playwriting to have emerged so far in the twenty-first century... I can think of no other contemporary playwright who has asked such a compelling set of questions about theatrical form, narrative content, and spectatorial engagement."Professor Stephen Bottoms, Introduction, Tim Crouch: Plays One, Oberon Books, 2011
Holly Williams, writing in The Independent in June 2014, says, "Crouch has built a name for himself as one of British drama's great innovators, with plays that have disturbed and challenged the passive theatrical experience."
The Independent, 8 June 2014
My Arm tells the story of a boy who, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, puts his arm in the air and keeps it there for thirty years. In the process, he becomes a celebrated medical specimen and an icon of the New York art scene. In his introduction to the published play, Crouch wrote, 'The boy's action is more meaningful to others than to himself. His arm becomes the ultimate inanimate object onto which others project their own symbols and meanings.'Tim Crouch, My Arm, Faber and Faber, 2003.
This theme of projecting meaning is reflected in the staging. Crouch invites audience members to lend personal possessions, such as keys, jewelry, mobile phones, and photos, which are then cast as "actors", shown on a live video feed. Professor Stephen Bottoms describes the effect of this: "The lack of physical resemblance between the presented objects and the things they are made to represent creates a sense of humorous incongruity, but also allows the audience to bring in personal associations of their own. I recall, in one performance, being strangely moved by seeing a pencil case and a can of body spray bullying the Action Man doll which always stands in as the young 'Tim'. Precisely by not showing us what the bullies 'really' looked like, or having actors 'emote' their aggression, Crouch allowed me to fill in my own responsive associations with the scene described."
My Arm, co-directed by Crouch, Karl James and Hettie McDonald, opened to universal acclaim at the Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Festival in 2003. It was later adapted for BBC Radio 3, winning a 2006 Prix Italia for Best Adaptation in the Radio Drama category.
Crouch has described My Arm as "the mothership" of his later plays, which all reference it in some way. Catherine Love, Interview with Tim Crouch, The Stage, 22 June 2014 He told Catherine Love that his 2014 play, Adler and Gibb, was "a very much bigger and more complex version of My Arm."
While the hypnotist is played by Crouch, the father is always played by a different actor, male or female, old or young. This second actor, who knows nothing about the play before going on stage, is guided through the performance by Crouch using spoken instructions and pages of script. The play was co-directed by Crouch's long-time collaborators, Karl James, and Andy Smith, the poet and performance artist known as "a smith", who Crouch originally asked to play the father. Smith suggested, "Why don't you get a different actor to play the father each time?"
An Oak Tree opened at the Traverse Theatre, in the 2005 Edinburgh Festival, where it had a sell-out run and won a Herald Angel award. International tours followed, including a three-month run at the Barrow Theatre in New York, where it won a special citation OBIE award. To date, over 300 actors have appeared as the father in the play, including Mike Myers, Christopher Eccleston, Frances McDormand, F. Murray Abraham, James Wilby, Laurie Anderson, Toby Jones, Mark Ravenhill, Geoffrey Rush, Tracy-Ann Oberman, David Morrissey, Saskia Reeves, Hugh Bonneville, Peter Gallagher, Juliet Aubrey, Paterson Joseph, Janet McTeer, Alan Cumming, Alanis Morissette, Samuel West, Samuel Barnett, and Patrick Marber.
In 2005, Crouch described his own experience of performing with a different actor each time: "Every single father has been as different as every person is different ... Maybe some have acted too much and some have not acted at all. At times, they've each done exactly what I thought I didn't want them to do. But, in so doing, they are each and every one a revelation. They have done the play in their own way. It will never be exactly how I want it - and thank God for that."
Lyn Gardner reviewed a performance in which the father was played by Sophie Okonedo: "Watching her, never for a moment do you forget that she is a woman, and Crouch cannily ensures with his stream of stage directions that you never can forget that she is an actor. Nonetheless, as the evening wears on, neither do you doubt that she is a middle-aged man. She looks the same, but she is different."
In 2015, on the play's tenth anniversary, Crouch revived An Oak Tree for a June–July run at the National Theatre, London, followed by a return to the Traverse Theatre, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
In 2019, The Independent included An Oak Tree in its list of "The 40 best plays to read before you die". Paul Taylor and Holly Williams, 'The 40 best plays to read before you die, from Antigone to A Streetcar Named Desire', The Independent, 28 February 2019
Crouch describes the play as "the story of one thing placed inside another: a heart inside another person's body, a culture inside another country's culture, theatre inside a gallery, a character inside an actor, a play inside its audience." Lyn Gardner saw it as "an endlessly thoughtful piece which artfully challenges a globalised world where everything is for sale, and questions the value we put on art and on human life." In August 2007, the play opened at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, where it won a Total Theatre award, a Fringe First and a Herald Archangel. Since then, ENGLAND has been performed in galleries across the UK and USA and also visited Oslo, Lisbon, Quebec, Madrid, Dublin, Wiesbaden, Melbourne, Singapore, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Budapest and Tehran.
In the play, Crouch plays "Tim Crouch", an in-yer-face playwright who has written an abusive play, which has a destructive effect on everyone involved in it, from the author to the actors and audience. Crouch removed the stage, placing the audience on two banks of seats facing each other, where they watch each other watching the play. Four actors were placed among the audience, telling the story of the abusive play. The original cast had Vic Llewllyn and Esther Smith as the actors, and Adrian Howells as the audience member. When The Author transferred to the Traverse for the Edinburgh Festival, Adrian Howells' role was taken by Chris Goode. In 2011, the play, with the same cast, was performed in the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles.
The Author divided critics and audiences, and there were many walk-outs. The play itself invited this reaction, including a staged walk-out early on in the action.
Writing in the Guardian in 2011, Crouch described the varied responses audiences gave the play, in Britain and in the USA: "This is a play during which audience members have read newspapers and novels, built paper aeroplanes, performed Mexican waves, sung happy birthday to one of their own, recited poetry, slow hand-clapped, physically threatened actors, hummed out loud with their fingers in their ears, muttered obscenities, shouted actors down, and thrown copies of the text at the playwright. This is a play where 10% of the audience has been known to leave during a performance – each walkout a mini drama in the unfolding narrative of the event. This is a play where the absence of applause at the end has sometimes felt like a blessing and sometimes like eternal damnation. This is a play during which an audience member once passed out; the actors insisted again and again it was not part of the performance, but everyone in the space assumed it was – including the ushers."
Describing the play to Exeunt magazine, Crouch said, "Andy sits at the side of the stage and introduces himself and ostensibly he tells his own story. And playing opposite that is a fictionalized, identifiable other character, who kind of inhabits the other sort of form, the other sort of world. He's a character who attempts to make sense of the world by being physically present in it rather than sitting at the side of it and watching it – by being physically present in a world that he is working very hard to generate on this stage. The push and the pull is between those two worlds ... My character is active – politically active, sexually active, physically active. Andy's character in this play is inactive or reflective."
Simon Holton reviewed the play for A Younger Theatre: "One of the central concerns of the piece is absence and presence, the space of the theatre and the simple act of being together in that space — what it means, and what it can do. The message of hope rings out loud and clear without ever being preachy or dogmatic. Wonderful, original, powerful theatre"
Crouch and smith took the play to Edinburgh, where it ran at the Drill Hall Studio for the Forest Fringe, from 18-24 August 2013. Joyce McMillan reviewed the play in The Scotsman: "As the friend – in a terrific performance from Crouch – rages and sulks and drinks and becomes increasingly, aggressively nervous of the gang of local kids hanging around outside, it gradually becomes apparent – in this brilliant piece of collaborative writing by two master makers – that the dysfunction is not all on one side.
"Andy, in his chair, constantly avoids his friend's gaze, preferring to address the audience about the theoretical value of theatre in bringing people together. He has succumbed to what sounds like a suffocating domesticity with his Norwegian wife and little daughter, constantly asking his friend to remove his shoes (we all remove our shoes) and not to smoke in the house. There's something vital about male middle age here, something about north and south, something about the smugness of contentment, and the activist value of honest misery. And something about theatre, too, if only because at the end of 70 minutes, the two are still there, still talking, still in the same space, as they might not have been if Tim and Andy hadn't decided to make a show about them."
The play, co-directed again by Crouch, James and Smith, saw their most ambitious formal experiments to date. The acting style changed throughout the play, which began with abstraction, as the actors faced front, saying their lines without gestures, accents or actions. They then moved through more dimensional performances to full realism in the second half. Crouch described this as "a tide of realism, this play – it begins low tide and it goes full high tide, in story and form." Holly Williams, 'Adler & Gibb: Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?', The Independent, 24 June 2014 Naturalism was further undercut by the presence of two children on stage, building an earth barrow and introducing absurd props. Crouch explained, "It's a pricking of that absurd structure that we've built around us in terms of representation: kids are just so free from that. The child actor – a child, pretending to be another child – is kind of stupid. There are these things that disturb naturalism, like animals, like children, like guns, like nudity: as soon as Ian McKellen gets his wanger out in King Lear, King Lear stops for a bit."
The play was deliberately challenging to audiences. Beccy Smith recorded one audience reaction in her Total Theatre review: "I don't want to have to work this hard", complains one man behind me during the interval, "I come here to be entertained!" Beccy Smith, 'Tim Crouch: Adler and Gibb', Total Theatre website Michael Billington in The Guardian described it as "a show that defies storytelling convention: the fact is that, for much of the first half, we don't understand what is going on." Michael Billington, 'Adler and Gibb', The Guardian, 20 June 2014 He concluded, "I found myself growing into the piece, while feeling that the playfully experimental form dominated the intriguing content."
Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out wrote, "The lunatic has been given the keys to the asylum: with his new work 'Adler & Gibb', mischievous metatheatrical theatre maker Tim Crouch comes in from the outer edges to stage a first work on the Royal Court's storied main stage. The step up in scale isn't stumble-free. But at its best, this hilarious, harrowing and maddening interrogation of the value of art explodes with fearless intent and piercing intelligence". Andrzej Lukowski, 'Adler and Gibb', Time Out, 20 June 2014
The most enthusiastic review came from the independent critic, Matt Trueman, who wrote, "It's gripping: a full-throttle, partners-in-crime road movie of sorts, splashed with Tarantino-esque swagger and post-Kerouac cool ... Adler and Gibb is enormous ... It encompasses a whole load of things – and those things feel absolutely current. Crouch is grappling – really grappling – with what it means to exist now, in 2014, with our virtual reality, surrounded by signs and simulacra, with the past regurgitated as reference and retro. Where is truth in all this? Where does art stop and reality begin? Where is life?" Matt Trueman, 'Review: Adler & Gibb, Royal Court', http://matttrueman.co.uk
At the Royal Court, the cast comprised Amelda Brown (Gibb), Brian Ferguson (Sam), Denise Gough (Louise) and Rachel Redford (the Student). A simplified production played at Summerhall during the Edinburgh Festival in 2016, and then went to the Unicorn Theatre London and, in 2017, to the Kirk Douglas Theatre Los Angeles. The cast comprised Gina Moxley (Gibb), Cath Whitefield (Louise), Mark Edel-Hunt (Sam) and Jillian Pullara (the student). Crouch took over the role of Sam for the Los Angeles production. Charles McNulty in the LA Times described the play as "a kind of avant-garde-by-numbers production that leaves out what has distinguished Crouch's work in the past — the bold interrogation of the audience's role in the theatrical event".Charles McNulty, 'In 'Adler & Gibb,' the business of art — painted with familiar brushstrokes', LA Times, 19 January 2017
Crouch first performed the play in August 2022 at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, as part of the fringe festival. David Kettle described it as "a pretty uncompromising, hopeless piece in many ways: Crouch points to parallels between Lear’s fractured world and our own many and varied contemporary problems, and even casts himself forward to future anthropologists who might wonder why people once gathered in rooms together, like we all have, to watch other people pretend to be yet other people....It generates an immense cumulative power, raising profound questions while refusing to offer easy answers." David Kettle, 'Edinburgh Fringe 2022 reviews: Every Word was Once an Animal / Tim Crouch: Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel', theartsdesk, 11 August 2022 In The Scotsman, Joyce McMillan wrote, "There is something brilliant, haunting and tragic about Crouch’s suggestion that what is left of theatre has itself become a site of struggle; between those who still fully believe in shared human experience as we once knew it, and those who suspect that those times may be ending, to be replaced by forms of digital connection that offer both more, and much, much less." Joyce McMillan, 'Edinburgh Festival Fringe theatre reviews: Tim Crouch: Truth’s A Dog Must To Kennel | Every Word Was Once An Animal', The Scotsman, 11 August 2022 Deborah Chu in The Observer, wrote, "All the action is taking place behind Crouch’s VR headset, which he relays to us with moving aplomb. But the scope of his uncanny vision expands out into the audience too, until the theatre becomes a microcosm for the world at large, full of tiered inequality and minor cruelties dressed up as politesse." Deborah Chu, 'Edinburgh fringe 2022 week two roundup: from a sheep shearer in peril to pure Hollywood escapism', Observer, 20 August 2022 In a 5 star review subtitled 'Exit, mind blown', Hugh Simpson described the play as "an exquisitely prescient piece that apparently denies the very point of creativity, a hymn to humanity that insists that humanity has had it. To call it thought-provoking would be a criminal understatement." Hugh Simpson, 'Truth's a Dog Must to Kennel', alledinburghfringe.com, 13 August 2022 The play won a Fringe First award from The Scotsman. Andrew Eaton-Lewis, 'Fringe Firsts: six more winners of our Edinburgh Fringe new writing awards revealed', The Scotsman, 19 August 2022
Truth's a Dog Must to Kennel was co-directed by Karl James and Andy Smith, with sound design and music from Pippa Murphy and lighting by Laura Hawkins. Production details from the Royal Lyceum Theatre website
In I, Caliban, Crouch is the monster from The Tempest, left alone on the island after all the characters have departed, with one last bottle of wine, and still missing his mum. Caliban introduces himself to the audience: "You're thinking, what an ugly man...Well, YOU'D BE UGLY IF YOU HAD A LIFE LIKE MINE." In I, Peaseblossom, he is the innocent child fairy from A Midsummer Night's Dream, a character who only gets one line in Shakespeare's play. I, Banquo is a darker play, for teenagers, narrated by the murdered best friend of Macbeth. Crouch appears on stage, "accompanied by a heavy-metal-guitar-playing 13 year old Fleance, a severed head and 32 litres of blood."
One girl performer, interviewed for the trailer for a 2011 production in Plymouth, said, "The play is cool because the narrators say things like 'What do you think?' And most plays they tell you what to think. Plus it rhymes, which is really cool."
Joyce McMillan, reviewing I, Malvolio in the Scotsman, wrote, "There's never anything less than fully adult about this searing deconstruction of the conflict between Malvolio and – well, who? Not only the other characters, it seems, but us, the audience of relentless good-time boys and girls, laughing at Malvolio's humiliation, mocking the brief hope of love he enjoys."
In a 2020 revival, directed by Naomi Wirthner at the Unicorn Theatre London, Crouch played Cinna. Interviewed by Catherine Greenwood, he talked about how the play had taken on new meanings since the first run: "2012 was the year after the riots in London so there was a connection to that in the original production. But the riots feel piecemeal, small scale, compared to what's happening globally now. And the idea of a country being led by a dictator who's manipulating language – welcome to the world!...Words at the moment are really complex, slippery, things politically. In 2012, we were infants in that world, and now we're horrified teenagers going, Can words really have that effect? People can lie, using the right words, they lie and everyone just accepts them. And that is also in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; Mark Antony turns the whole course of history with his use of language." Catherine Greenwood, Interview with Crouch, I, Cinna (the poet), Teacher Resource Pack, Unicorn Theatre, 2019, p9
In her review in The Stage, Sally Hales wrote that "Crouch weaves a rich tapestry of meaning that encompasses revolution, republicanism, democracy, the power of the written word, freedom and personal responsibility in a digital age....Lily Arnold's set is backed by a large swathe of crumpled paper on to which Will Monks' violent video imagery of riots flash up during startling moments accompanied by Owen Crouch's soundscape, bursting from near-silence into pulsating, insistent beats. This, along with Crouch's enthralling storytelling, combines to give the show a relentless sense of urgency." Sally Hales, 'I, Cinna (The Poet) review at Unicorn Theatre, London – 'a fascinating feat of storytelling', The Stage, 14 February 2020
Melinda Haunton, on the View from the Cheap Seat site, wrote, "It's a tribute to how successful this show is as creative inspiration that a sticky press night audience of adults and critics scribbled without stopping." Melinda Haunton, 'I Cinna the Poet Unicorn Theatre;, View from the Cheap Seat, 14 February 2020 Eve Allin, in Exeunt magazine, responded to Crouch's poetic challenge by writing her review of the show "in sonnets and haikus and couplets." Eve Allin, Review: I, Cinna (The Poet) at Unicorn Theatre, Exeunt, 13 February 2020
The play, directed by Crouch, was first performed at London's Unicorn Theatre in March 2018. The cast comprised five adult actors (Pandora Colin, Rob Das, Jacqui Dubois, Neil D'Souza and Amalia Vitale) playing the children, their parents, and a dog. The children were also embodied by four young actors, with roles shared by Atinuke Akinrinade, Ethan Dattani, Nekisha Eric, Rowan Davies-Moore, Archie MacGregor, Ella Scott, Emilija Trajkovic, and Milan Verma. Beginners was designed by Chloe Lamford and Camilla Clarke with music by Nick Powell.
Miriam Gillinson, in Time Out, described the play as "a properly grown-up piece of children's theatre that reaches across the generations... Crouch likes to tease his audience... test our senses and generally mess with our heads. The real thrill here is that Crouch applies these exact same methods to his family show and pulls it off brilliantly....The stage is gradually given over to the four talented young actors...Their hopes and dreams fill the space... and we realise these are really our hopes and dreams, only fresher and freer." Miria Gillinson, Beginners review, Time Out, 11 January 2018 Maddy Costa, in Exeunt, described Beginners as "complex and nuanced, slippery and sly, frequently hilarious, densely poetic, often bewildering to my children, but pleasingly a challenge to their powers of deduction." Maddy Costa, 'Review: Beginners at the Unicorn Theatre', Exeunt, 3 April 2018 Lyn Gardner, in The Guardian, wrote that the play "operates like a mischievous yet emotionally textured murder mystery, but one without a body. It investigates instead how childhood gets killed....The pleasure in Crouch's increasingly funny play is in the way that...he gradually enlarges the metaphysical and physical space. Watching it – and the play within the play that the children stage – we expand our belief in what's possible and how we can overcome what life throws at us." Lyn Gardner, 'Beginners review – the rainy holiday that changed the world', The Guardian, 30 March 2018 However, The Evening Standard critic, Fiona Mountford, "constantly struggled to work out whether the characters we were watching were adults or children." Fiona Mountford, 'Beginners Review: Family holiday without the drama', Evening Standard, 5 April 2018
The play was first performed in February 2022 at the Young Peoples' Theatre in Newcastle. Young People's Theatre listing for Superglue A second production by Croydon Youth Theatre was staged at Southwark Playhouse in April. Southwark playhouse listing for Superglue
In 2023 the Unicorn Theatre commissioned Crouch to return to his original idea, finish the script and direct it. For the production, which ran from 6 October to 3 November 2024, the creative team included regular Crouch collaborator Lily Arnold (Designer), Will Monks (Lighting design) and the sound designer Helen Skiera with whom Crouch had work on The Author (2009) and Adler & Gibb (2014). Effy was played by Peyvand Sadeghian. Toto/Noah were played by Felipe Pacheco. The voice of the Mother was recorded by Sinead Matthews. Toto Kerblammo! on the Unicorn Theatre website
In its four star review, The Guardian described the sound design as being used ‘to both playful and profound effect’ and said that the audience ‘leave the theatre with sharpened senses’. Chris Wiegand, 'Toto Kerblammo! review – Tim Crouch offers up doggy delight and human heartache', The Guardian, 17 October 2024 The Stage, in a five star review, concluded that ‘what resonates most is a deep sense of mystery surrounding the workings of the human mind and, above all, the heart.’ Oliver Jones, Toto Kerblammo! Review, The Stage, 22 October 2024 London’s Time Out described the play as ‘an exquisite portrait of childhood woundedness and emotional inarticulacy.’ Andrzej Lukowski, 'Review Toto Kerblammo!', Time Out, 23 October 2024 In its five star review, North West End wrote: 'The concept is clever and the execution brilliant, but the true genius of this play is its heart. Tim Crouch affords his characters the space to be genuinely intelligent, complex and tender. It is affirming to see – to hear – and is the driving argument for the love and care this play demands we show to ourselves. We are all struggling, we are all complicated, and yet we are all worthy. Messaging which is vital for adults and children alike.’ Sadie Pearson,'Toto Kerblammo! – Unicorn Theatre', North West End,24 October 2024
Crouch received an The Offies for best writer for Young Audiences Offies website listing and Helen Skiera received one for Best Sound Design for Young Audiences.
In 2012, Crouch was invited by the Dutch theatre company Kassys to collaborate, along with the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma] and Nicole Beutler in Cadavre Exquis, a project inspired by the Surrealist parlour game, Exquisite Corpse. A Cadavre Exquis is a poem (or a drawing) written by several poets, without knowing what the others have written. "The first writer writes a line of poetry on a piece of paper. Then he folds the paper in such a way that only the last word is visible. The second writer continues." The rules set out for the theatre project were that "Each director makes a part that is maximum 15 minutes. As a starting point each director only sees the last 60 seconds of the previous part. Each director brings in one performer." Crouch, who brought Hannah Ringham, from ENGLAND, as his performer, wrote, "Cadavre Exquis magnifies the process of the here and now. It throws us into the arms of a response, which feels like the most productive way to work. The project also elevates its audience by not being in full control of itself. By quartering the traditional unity of intent, the theatre makers become as associative as the audience."
In 2016, Crouch adapted and directed The Complete Deaths by Spymonkey, in which all 75 onstage deaths in Shakespeare's plays were performed. After previews at the Royal & Derngate in Northampton, The Complete Deaths premiered in May at the Theatre Royal Brighton as part of the Brighton Festival. Reviewing the show in The Stage, Natasha Tripney wrote, "The pairing of Spymonkey with director Tim Crouch turns out to be inspired. The show contains moments of physical brilliance but also some equally entertaining repurposing of live art tropes....The best moments are when it manages to feel both like a Spymonkey show and a Tim Crouch production at the same time, a bloody marriage of slapstick and something more probing about the staging of death: the extinguishing of life and light. But it never entirely removes its tongue from its cheek; the production's main aim is to make its audience laugh, which it does, often. We laugh with them at death."
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Natasha Tripney, The Complete Deaths review at Theatre Royal, Brighton – 'brilliantly ridiculous', The Stage, 12 May 2016
"If you have a good restriction, it is really easy: I have to make a play that will contain an actor who doesn't know the play, and suddenly ideas start flooding about devices and models of imparting character."
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