It circles elegantly around ideas of presence and absence, the real and the representational, doubt and certainty, even time itself ... [It's] one of the shows that has changed our perceptions of what theatre might be ... It's no dry experiment in form, but an unexpectedly emotional 70 minutes that questions how we perceive and interpret the world and deal with grief and absence ... Like a magician showing us how the trick is done, Crouch doesn't diminish our belief in what we see, but enhances it. “Do you see nothing there?” asks Hamlet after seeing the ghost. An Oak Tree takes absence and magnifies it until we see the ghosts, too.

Guardian

A play about theatre, a magic trick, a laugh and a vivid experience of grief, and it spoils you for a while for other plays

Caryl Churchill, playwright

An Oak Tree..., a syllabus staple ... is full of ... optical illusions. Eventually reality and fiction start to entwine or fuse together ... It's not just arid academia, mind; not just theatre about theatre. An Oak Tree is just as concerned with grief and the whole thing's a metaphor for the way that an absence can have a real presence. It's loaded with feeling too ...Increasingly, Crouch's body of work - made in conjunction with his regular collaborators a. smith and Karl James - looks as influential as any in British theatre. He is the heir to Peter Brook and Simon McBurney: British theatre's magic circle.

Whatsonstage