Gentle Acts of Removal, Replacement and Reduction: Considering the Audience in Co-Directing the Work of Tim Crouch

Abstract

This document, written by the co-director of Tim Crouch's plays AnOak Tree, ENGLAND, and The Author, considers the approach taken to script development, rehearsal and performance for these pieces. It proposes that Crouch's two directors function primarily as enquiring surrogates for prospective audience members.

Notes

Helen Freshwater, Theatre & Audience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 6.

Chris Goode, Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire, 14 October 2010. http://beescope.blogspot.com [accessed 20 October 2010].

Email exchange between a smith and Steve Bottoms, 25August 2010.

A reference to the speech Chris Goode delivers in The Author: ‘I saw a play last year. And I remember thinking, “that writer has imagined me”. I've been imagined! Poorly imagined!’ (Tim Crouch, The Author [London: Oberon, 2009], p. 20).

See Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1995), in which he refers to theatre as ‘not an empty space, but a populated place’, (Loc 508–10, Kindle edn).

Tim Crouch, ENGLAND (London: Oberon, 2007), p. 13.

Tim Crouch, My Arm (London: Faber, 2003), p. 11.

Eco Umberto, The Poetics of The Open Work (1962), reprinted in Claire Bishop (ed.), Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art) (London and Cambridge MA: Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2006), p. 20.

Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 145.

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), p. 4.

Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 2^nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997), p. 153.

Peter Handke, ‘Offending the Audience' in Handke Plays: 1 (London: Methuen, 1997), pp. 1–32. See also Freshwater, Theatre & Audience, p. 1.

Ibid., p. 27.

See the last lines of Tim Crouch's plays: ‘When you open your eyes’, An Oak Tree (London: Oberon 2005), p. 61; ‘What did she say?’, ENGLAND, p. 62; ‘The writing is leaving the writer’, The Author (London: Oberon, 2009), p.59.