Wednesday 7 May 2025
What sounded fascinating - a play where the actor has never seen a script or a performance and learns what has happened from an onstage prompt at the same time as the audience - was ... interesting but not compelling.
A grieving father visits an oak tree that he thinks is his dead daughter, who perished in a car accident. The man that killed his daughter is a stage hypnotist and the two meet when the grieving father volunteers to go on stage. The writer plays the hypnotist, a different actor plays the grieving father (parent) each night. Interesting idea? Yes. Bold idea? Hmm, may be. Hubris? Certainly.
What might have been a gut-wrenchingly emotional play is stripped of emotion and resonance by stylistic folly. The actor is forced to lurch from one scene to another, to react, not act, while the forward momentum and audience attention is constantly interrupted by "director/actor" conversations that jerk the audience out of the play and into the theatre. The watcher is forcefully and repeatedly made to confront the fact that they are watching a dubiously-successful, experimental play.
