Further to my recent gushing about Metro Studio, here is some gushing about theatre productions you can see there.
Galen and I are taking our grannies to An Oak Tree, which sounds both mind-bending and heart-wrenching:
A man loses his daughter to a car. Nothing now is what it is. It’s like he’s in a play – but he doesn’t know the words or the moves. There are two actors in An Oak Tree. Tim Crouch is one. The second is different each performance and will walk on stage having neither seen nor read a word of the play until they’re in it. Crouch (playing a small-time stage hypnotist) pulls off a stunning feat of projection: transferring a fully-scripted play about the power of suggestion to the other actor, and creating a startling image of someone set adrift by loss, literally living from moment to moment.
Then we’re going back to see My Arm by the same people, such is our faith in the promotional write-ups:
“At the age of 10, for want of anything more meaningful to do, I put my arm above my head and kept it there. Now, thirty years on, I’m so full of meaning it’s killing me.”
A story of bloody-mindedness, modern art, and how the things we do as children stick with us for life—told by a performer who never raises his arm above his head, even once.
Sometimes theatre gimmicks really get on my nerves—like bad, pretentious performance art—but the conceptual twists in these Tim Crouch plays sound fascinating and potentially quite moving. They are a lot more ambitious than the usual audience participation for its own sake (seriously Fringe performers, by now we get it about the “fourth wall” or whatever). I hope my mind will be blown, at least a little bit.
Tickets through SelectYourTickets.com.
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