Tragic Events, Death and Mourning: Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree
Tragic Events, Death and Mourning: Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree

Summary/Abstract: Death is one of the most challenging and sorrowful life facts that strikes people’s lives and disrupts routine natural continuity of life. As it has happened in the past, today’s world struggles with unexpected unfavourable tragic events, and they bring undesirable outcomes for people even the loss of their dearest ones. The universality of death and its un/willingly accepted existence in people’s lives maybe slightly help in relieving the pain and grief of those who are closest to the deceased. The communal rites or people’s togetherness to heal the pain of death cannot be enough to terminate the individual agonies. In the way that it is exemplified in this study with this selected play An Oak Tree (2005), death places heavy and painful burden for people’s heart and mind. Written by one of the most sophisticated and prominent playwrights of the contemporary British theatre, Tim Crouch, this play portrays the disruptive and tristful period of mourning that follows a death after a tragic accident. Being a notable playwright to expose the hidden and invisible tragic status of contemporary people, Crouch reveals humane feelings related to death like trauma, guilt, shame, the pain of loss in this play with unfamiliar strategies of theatre. With this study the timeless relation between tragic events, death and mourning is aimed to be encapsulated, and this study will also deliver the potential responses and reactions of contemporary people in the face of death via the characters of Crouch’s selected play.

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