What led you to creating your own shows?
I came to writing relatively late, writing my first play, My Arm, when I was 38. It was an emotional and instinctive response to the difficulties and frustrations I was then experiencing as an actor. I felt really out of step with the kind of psychological realism which was then very much in favour, and I felt more and more keenly the need for a real reflection on theatricality—not in terms of spectacle, but the relationship between actor and audience. So I started writing as a challenge to the theatrical forms I found problematic. I tried to make the kind of theatre I would want to see. I’ve not stopped writing and experimenting since. Each play builds on the previous ones to continue exploring the following question: what does the audience latch onto, conceptually, in theatre?
What would you say are the fundamentals of your theatre?
I’m British, and in our culture, the focus tends to be on the stage. What I want to do is to turn the spotlight onto the audience. I think the place where true theatre happens is inside the spectator’s head. What happens onstage is an attempt to trigger something in there, and if we succeed, the audience becomes the ultimate collaborator of the dramatic act. There is of course a visual dimension to my theatre, but it’s based mostly on a vector that allows the listener to create their own reality, on a form of art to which I’m truly devoted: words! If I show a photograph, everyone will see the same dog; but if I say the word “dog,” everyone in the audience will have a different image in mind, one that’s specific to them, that they produced themselves. I think it’s the most empowering relationship there is. It seems particularly revealing to me that the word “audience” comes, etymologically, from “audio,” from listening. My work asks the audience to listen, because it is by listening that they’ll be able to see—within themselves.
Naturally, can you tell us what Oak Tree means to you?
When my first play was published, I promised myself that the next one would be called An Oak Tree. It’s the title of a conceptual work of art created in 1973 by American/Irish artist Michael Craig-Martin. Physically, it’s just a glass of water on a shelf. But next to it is a text, a Q&A in which the artist explains how he has turned the glass of water into a mature oak tree. He explains how he did it without changing its physical appearance; the eye sees a glass of water, but it’s no longer that: it’s an oak tree in the form of a glass of water. It’s a very beautiful text, funny, light, provocative, deep, evocative… just stunning. It’s stuck with me, in part because I think it’s about theatre: just replace the glass with an actor, the oak tree by a character. For the time of the performance, the actor is no longer himself. That’s what art is: the idea of something within something else; Hamlet within an actor; Elsinore within a theatre; an oak tree within a glass of water. I love this process because it’s so playful, easy, free, and open to all.
How does this very conceptual reference find an echo in the very concrete story of your show?
Each of my plays starts with a story, for which I then try to find the most appropriate form. In An Oak Tree, the story I tell is that of a transformation. Not that of a glass of water turned into a tree, but of a tree turned into a child. The story is simple: a father has lost his daughter. Faced with this loss, he transforms the oak tree that stands near where she was killed into his daughter. In doing so, this man, although he isn’t an artist, creates a monumental work of art, and his daughter, in the form of this tree, is probably more present than she ever was when she was alive. We can identify with this emotional process, which can make an idea easier to grasp than reality. As for the second character of the play, a hypnotist, he embodies another of my beliefs which posits that all art is a form of hypnosis. To enter the work, the audience must accept to suspend their rational conscience, just as in a hypnotic trance. An Oak Tree therefore brings together several concepts that are important to me, which allow us to play with the very idea of theatre and performance. But this play also asks you to work on an emotional level, which creates a connection between audience and actors.
There are two actors in this show: you and another, whose identity changes for each performance…
The specificity of An Oak Tree, formally speaking, is that the second actor must not have seen or read the play beforehand. It begins only an hour before the show, when we meet for this first time—a sort of prologue, but without an audience—to create a relationship of trust between us. The actor then discovers the play as they perform it, as they’re given the lines for their character, the father, using an variety of means. Sex, gender, origin, age, height, and build don’t matter: just like with Michael Craig-Martin’s glass of water, the actor’s body is but a shape the character will adopt to appear for the duration of the show. Like the character, the actor has therefore turned something into something else. Like him, they’re lost. Like him, they don’t know what’s going to happen. On another level, we can also see in this second actor an avatar of the audience, a physical projection of their mental process. Because the audience knows the actor is discovering the play at the same time that they are, they’re fully aware of and understand the sincerity, the unique character of what’s happening in front of them. This play is an adventure. A playful journey, with no right or wrong way to go about it, but an intense journey as well, because I ask the actor to leave behind all their certainties in order to fully open up to the immediacy of this relationship we’re building onstage. Every word we say was written, but apart from that, it can go in any direction. Within the structure offered by the text, our goal as actors is therefore to make our own path, to find our own space of freedom. That’s precisely why I like theatre and why, almost twenty years after its creation, every performance of An Oak Tree is new. I would have liked not to have written this play, to have the opportunity to be that second actor thrown into the unknown, fully open to my emotions, alert to all my potential… it’s a dream part for me!
This show was created in 2005, and has been performed more than 360 times since. How has it evolved?
360 performances, that means 360 different actors and 360 different ways of approaching the play. I’ve played opposite improvisers, cinema actors like Geoffrey Rush or Frances McDormand, or performers like Laurie Anderson… every time, the play regenerates thanks to that new presence. Every journey is unique, because it operates on an atomic level: at every moment, with every word, we take a step forward and shape the remainder of the show, every time in a unique way, since every individual will react differently to a look, an intonation, a gesture… The experience is never the same for me, either. Every time, I build a new artistic relationship with someone I’ve never met, not knowing what they’re going to bring in, which means I never tire of the show! The Festival d’Avignon will be yet another adventure, because although An Oak Tree has toured extensively, in particular in Europe and in the United States, it’s never been performed in France. I’m particularly interested in the possibilities offered by the game with “tu” and “vous” that exists in French but not in English, and which will add to the theme of duality that is at the heart of the play. It will also be the first time I perform this play outside, as we’ll be performing in the Cloître des Célestins, in a courtyard… between two trees. There will therefore be a lot of trees in those performances—a conceptual one, and two real ones! New is always good. Anything that prevents you from retreating into habit is a good thing. And I can’t wait to see what’s in store for me.
Interview conducted by Marie C. Lobrichon and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach