Minor thematic spoilers ahead.  

Visit the National Gallery of Australia, or the Tate gallery, and you’ll come across Michael Craig-Martin’s seminal artwork An Oak Tree. The work is, as the title suggests, a full-grown oak tree. What you’ll see, however, is a glass of water on a shelf – and a text mounted on the wall describing how Craig-Martin transformed that glass of water into a tree.

If you don’t agree with this contract – that the Craig-Martin has transubstantiated a glass of water into an oak tree “without altering the [philosophical] accidents of the glass of water” (as he describes it in the art text) – then Tim Crouch’s play of the same name, and which draws from the above artwork, is not for you.

Here’s the premise for this two-hander: actor Richard Homan is The Hypnotist. He knows the script and what is about to unfold over the next hour. Our other ‘second actor’ changes each night – with Missy Mooney taking the role of the Father on the opening show. She and the other second actors are deliberately kept in the dark about the contents of the play until around an hour before each show begins, but are given an earpiece and guided through the performance by The Hypnotist using spoken instructions and pages of script. It’s a canny concept that plays into our ideas of shared, constructed spaces, as well as exploring the transubstantiation of grief.

In An Oak Tree, The Hypnotist does much of the heavy lifting. He tells us he’s being a hypnotist and that he’ll never lie to the audience; he tells Missy when and how she can speak (neither actor is to improvise), embodying both director and performer at the same time. We’re instructed and invited to buy into the hypnotic suggestion, and that what we’re seeing is as real as anything else. This is the contract we all agree to when we watch An Oak Tree. And it’s either a pretentious nasal-gazing contrivance, or a brilliant comment on shared realities with an aching heart at its centre.

All plays contain a willing conceptual foolery, but experimental British theatre maker Tim Crouch has earned a name for toying with reality and the rules of consistency and conceptual space to acclaim. He’s established his name for pushing theatre in new directions, rejecting conventions like realism, props and costumes, and instead focusing on form and the deconstruction and reconstruction of a work.

As much as it’s a conceptual play, An Oak Tree owes a debt to the three parts of a magic trick: we are shown something ordinary, then something extraordinary, then a twist or trick to the illusion. Pledge – Turn – Prestige. An Oak Tree sets us up with these parts: the performers (ordinary), the guided performance (extraordinary), and the turning on its head of performer-audience realities through its key mechanism (the twist). But even if all the pieces are there, and especially if you aren’t given a compelling enough Turn, then the magic doesn’t work. And just because a play is conceptually interesting and full of Prestige doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed.

It’s not that the play doesn’t meaningfully explore ghosts (love, in another word) and grief, but that it fails to achieve the emotional grounding needed to ever land before we end up slurring into a new reality (actors, play-within-play, meta-hypnotism) and the previous one fades away without consequence. That constant to-and-fro keeps the audience on their philosophical toes, but it also means that we can’t find a cohesive, emotionally resonant grounding. I don’t know if this is an issue with the script itself, or the expectations placed on the performers, or, I suspect, the performers themselves, but the outcome was one of deep underwhelm for me.

Richard Homan and Missy Mooney are both reliable, intelligent actors and stalwarts of director Gaye Poole’s productions, and I admire them as people and performers. But they both come across as oddly stilted and unconvincing, never quite achieving the transformation necessary. Mooney isn’t helped by the fact that An Oak Tree is remarkably cruel play for a performer, forcing her into a startingly cold read by its very nature. I don’t envy her part. But even Homan’s Hypnotist feels like a facsimile (in this case, of Tim Crouch), missing some key elements of conviction that would persuade me that we’ve transubstantiated the play-space and that he is the Hypnotist.

But there’s also a strange paradox about the play that means it’s almost designed to not fail, even if it’s underwhelming. We’re meant to see the mechanisms of the play – that is its purpose. If the actors don’t quite hit their mark, then it’s a deliberate move designed to draw attention to the artifice of the play-space; if it’s compelling and authentic, it’s because it’s achieved its illusion and moved us. Line fumbles could be deliberate (there are many purposeful ones) or not; there’s no way of knowing. The shortcomings of the script are there to keep us reflecting on constructed spaces, even tongue-in-cheek reminding us that it’s “a bit contrived” and so excusing its problems. You could view it as all a bit of fun on the stage – and there’s a scattering of funny moments – but it also has ambitions of being a Great Work and is clearly adored by noteworthy artists around the world.

Almost 350 big names across the gender and age spectrums have attached themselves to this production opposite Crouch, each performing the Father role as he is described in the text and equally without having seen or read the text beforehand. Each second performer signs a different contract on faith alone, agreeing that this is a brilliant and award-winning work that’s had attached to it the likes of F Murray Abraham, Sophie Okonedo, Christopher Eccleston, Frances McDormand. This season is no different, with Waikato regulars appearing for a one-time-only event that presumably will attract respective fans and friends. But you don’t go to see An Oak Tree because it’s a brilliantly performed play with some big ideas. You’ll go because it has some big ideas, and someone you know and/or admire will be in it and you’d like to catch their unique and ephemeral approach to this play. If that’s enough, then so be it.

I don’t want to be cynical about An Oak Tree. I admire this play as a concept, and understand how an oak tree can also be a glass of water if we choose to believe it. But watching it on opening night, I can’t help but feel that what’s on stage lands without a heart, suffering the fatal flaw of being interesting but not engaging. From the view of the seating block, the glass is just a glass of water.

To quote our lead: “As we say in hypnotism – if it’s not there, it’s not there.”

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