words rachel mok

Three plays in the Hong Kong Arts Festival will challenge audience ideas of entertainment.

Tim Crouch, writer/performer of Brighton-based theatre company News From Nowhere, thinks differently from other artists. He is happy when people don’t like his work. When England – a play he staged in an art gallery with an audience limit of only 60 at any one time – became a triumph at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and every review was positive, he was concerned that he was playing too safe. ‘Then, in Australia [last] year, one critic didn’t like it! And I was happy!’ He’d rather stimulate thought than hear sweet words. ‘There are lots of ideas in my plays – and I want people to engage with the ideas and not just praise the set or the acting!’ he says. ‘Ideas are provocations, so I like to have an audience feel strongly about my work.’

The experimental dramatist will be bringing the three plays that earned him an OBIE (Off-Broadway Theatre Award), the Prix Italia, a Fringe First from Edinburgh and countless acclaimed reviews to the 2009 Arts Festival. And whether you like or even understand England; An Oak Tree and My Arm, Crouch hopes you will at least be startled. ‘If the work is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, then perhaps that is because I’ve never written it to be like something else,’ he says. For instance, in the two-hander An Oak Tree, although an invited artist plays against Crouch every night, the two don’t meet until an hour before the curtain-up. Since the show premiered in 2005, quite a few famous names have taken part including Joan Allen, who had not stepped on stage for 17 years prior to that performance, and Frances McDormand. But Crouch doesn’t care about his co-actors’ past successes, experience, or abilities. He may, he says, even turn Tom Cruise down should the movie star apply to be part of the show.

‘In the UK, sometimes actors send me photographs and CVs! I write back and thank them, but I say that this is not that kind of show! As an actor I was sick of being typecast,’ he explains. ‘There is no typecasting in An Oak Tree!’ For the HK performances, Lynn Yau (chief administrator of Shakespeare4All), veteran RTHK broadcaster Jonathan Douglas and former artistic director of the HK Rep Fredric Mao will play a father who has just lost a daughter in a car accident and who, imagining she has become an oak tree next to the spot where she died, has come to a hypnotist –who is also the man who drove the car that killed his daughter – for answers.
Crouch’s guests are all experienced performing artists, but he purposely keeps them in the dark about what will happen on stage. ‘I knew that the story would be better told if there was someone in the middle of it who didn’t know from moment to moment where they were going. The second actor in that play has never seen or read it before that walk onto the stage,’ he says. He only needs the invited actor to trust him and believe they can do no wrong – because there is no right or wrong. ‘They will play a character who has lost their compass in life,’ he explains, ‘and they themselves will have lost their compass on stage.’ It doesn’t matter whether his co-actor is a man or woman.

My Arm, an absurd story about a 10-year-old boy who raises his arm above his head and keeps it there for the next 30 years ‘for want of anything more meaningful to do’, is – amazingly – his first play. It took him only five days to write when he was 38 (though over the past six years it has inspired an on-going process of post-rationalisation, constantly surprising Crouch at how much it contains). He wrote it when starring in a ‘naff soap opera’ and was about to give up his acting career. He never considered that My Arm would be produced. ‘It was a response to the many frustrations I had felt as an actor. And it was a story! The story dictated how it wanted to be told, how the play should be.’ And that is how the creative process has evolved for Crouch – he won’t write until his story tells him how it wants to be told. ‘This is the relationship between form and content which is so important to me,’ he states. ‘Some playwrights apply the same form to every story they tell and I don’t understand that.’

While absurd ideas like keeping an arm stretched for three decades are not floating in Crouch’s mind all the time, he is not interested in theatre that tries to reproduce a reality on stage either. ‘There is something more transformative in theatre that doesn’t require that figurative realism. It’s about turning an empty space into somewhere else; an actor into someone else; a time into sometime else.’ In the play England, he turns an art gallery into an intimate theatre – in Hong Kong it will be the Tang Contemporary Art, the play taking place within the exhibition Illegal Structure by spatial designer William Lim. Crouch performs with fellow actress Hannah Ringham. ‘Too much theatre is about a quest for perfection,’ he says. ‘My work is trying to celebrate the human in all its brilliance and all its flaws.’

The Briton considers himself more of a ‘theatre maker’ than a playwright. In his mind a playwright is a literary being, and he doesn’t feel literary enough. ‘A playwright is someone who is driven to write – from an early age, maybe. I, however, am driven first and foremost to create an experience on stage. My writing somehow feels secondary to the stage moment. The words are needed, but they are servants to a bigger picture.’ The journey of the second actor through An Oak Tree, the presence of the audience as a character in the second act of England and associations created by the audience’s donation of objects in My Arm are, for example, devices that cannot be scripted.

Tellingly, Crouch will not allow another director to take a hand in his work. ‘When I write, I see the whole picture and I need to be involved in the generation of that picture’ he says. ‘It’s why I still act in the plays. I feel uncomfortable asking someone else to represent my ideas. I need to be there.’

In My Arm, one of the characters proclaims ‘Art is anything you can get away with.’ Crouch doesn’t agree but is, he says, interested in the notion. ‘So much art is about an act of suggestion. I tell you this painting is worth £1 million and you will immediately see it in a different way.’ There isn’t, and never has been, anything objective in art from the artist’s point of view. ‘It exists in a matrix of suggestion and projection – and some artists exploit this opportunity for their own gains. I hope I am not one of them, but I understand the forces that operate in this respect.’

Tim Crouch is quite aware of the irony of his views. with experimental works sharing a festival with traditional theatre – like Peter Hall’s Pygmalion. ‘My work couldn’t be much more different as an example of English theatre,’ he says. ‘It will be fascinating to see how this difference is accepted.’

See Tim Crouch’s England on February 6 and 10-13 at 8pm; February 7 and 8 at 3pm and 6pm at Tang Contemporary Art (Basement, 233 Hollywood Rd, Sheung Wan). Tickets are $240. An Oak Tree will be staged at the HK Cultural Centre on February 14 and 15 at 8:15pm, with an extra 5pm show on February 15. My Arm has a performance on February 14 at 5pm at the same venue. Tickets for both shows are $240 and $180 from URBTIX, 2734 9009.