Tim Crouch is a UK theatre artist based in Brighton. Since 2003, he was been writing plays in which he performs and takes responsibility for their production. Crouch works with a number of associates and collaborators to produce his writing. His work includes My Arm, An Oak Tree, ENGLAND and The Author. He also writes plays for children and occasionally works as a director.Seda Ilter is a lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She is the author of Mediatized Dramaturgy: The Evolution of Plays in the Media Age (Methuen Drama, 2021) and she works on theoretical and aesthetic implications of new technologies and mediatized culture in theatre, new writing and modes of textuality in contemporary performance and new dramaturgies.

It circles elegantly around ideas of presence and absence, the real and the representational, doubt and certainty, even time itself ... [It's] one of the shows that has changed our perceptions of what theatre might be ... It’s no dry experiment in form, but an unexpectedly emotional 70 minutes that questions how we perceive and interpret the world and deal with grief and absence ... Like a magician showing us how the trick is done, Crouch doesn’t diminish our belief in what we see, but enhances it. “Do you see nothing there?” asks Hamlet after seeing the ghost. An Oak Tree takes absence and magnifies it until we see the ghosts, too.

• ChronologyCommentaryCultural and Theatrical ContextsThemesStructurePlay as PerformanceProduction HistoryAcademic Debate Behind the Scenes: An Interview with Tim Crouch Further ExplorationPLAY TEXTNotes