Essential yet evocative language, minimalistic settings, few images but much imagination. At the 52nd Biennale Teatro, the great English actor, director, and playwright Tim Crouch presents the Italian premiere of his “Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel”.
Tim Crouch will be in Venice with his latest show, Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel (2022). Crouch is an Englishman and, he admits as much, knows that “everything begins with Shakespeare.” His famed re-writings I, Shakespeare are a collection of five monologues for a younger audience and a spin-off of Shakespeare’s comedies and drama. The Complete Deaths, staged with Spymonkey, is the composition of the seventy-five deaths to be found in the Bard’s oeuvre – this includes Titus Andronicus’ swatting a housefly. More generally, Crouch’s work is diverse, yet always leaning on the side of anti-representational experiments. His pieces explore the issue of the relationship with the audience, who are the focus of the theatre experience. There’s room for essential, though evocative, language, minimal scenes, few images, and much imagination. His work is considered one of the most advanced research programmes in contemporary British theatre. In one of his most famous shows, An Oak Tree, the second actor to step on the stage is a randomly picked audience member. Without them, the show cannot go on, and in turn, their participation embodies what Crouch sees as the audience’s authorship. In Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel, Tim Crouch is on stage, wearing a (fake) VR visor. He enters a virtual theatre, where King Lear is being produced. A fake audience replaces the real one, while the author describes what he sees to the real audience, asking for an imagination effort.
