ABSTRACT
From the very beginning, An Oak Tree demands the attention of its audience. Look goes the repeated refrain of the opening scene, offering multiple invitations for us to engage our senses and foregrounding the visual qualities of the theatrical event immediately before its key transformations occur. Yet An Oak Tree is not, strictly speaking, an interactive piece of theatre. Crouch's work has often been discussed in terms of the relationships it creates with its audiences. While his plays are not considered interactive or immersive, the place of the audience in his performances is always carefully thought through. As pointed out by both Susan Bennett in her seminal study Theatre Audiences, and later by Helen Freshwater in Theatre & Audience, audiences have been surprisingly neglected by theatre scholarship. Alongside this potentially problematic rhetoric of democracy and engagement, the treatment of the audience in Crouch's work is typically couched in a vocabulary of care.
