In his Fringe First Award winning recent play Truth's A Dog Must to Kennel Tim Crouch invites his audience to ‘see with their ears’ – a generous and liberating invitation that runs through Crouch’s work, from My Arm, An Oak Tree to The Author, Adler and Gibb, and Terrestrial Salvation. In Truth's A Dog Must to Kennel, Crouch makes this invitation in relation to our visually driven mediatized culture and imagination that has intensified during the pandemic, shaping how we experience and make theatre today. Crouch’s dramaturgy of imagination meditates on the transformative dynamics of theatre and engages the audience through what they see in their imaginations rather than what they see on stage. In this public performance lecture Crouch will walk us through his journey of words and works for the imagination, and share with us images, readings, and performances of his work.

Tim is a playwright, director, performer and theatre maker based in Brighton, UK. He was an actor before he started to write and he still performs in much of his work.

Tim’s plays are characterised by an attention to their audience. There is a devotion to the liveness of theatre and a recognition that the audience are the ultimate collaborators in the creation of meaning at the point of performance. The plays are meticulously scripted but engineered in such a way to ensure that no two performances are identical. From the inanimate objects donated by the audience in My Arm, to the unrehearsed second actor in An Oak Tree, to the audience writing in I, Cinna (the poet) and their reading in Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation, to the audience embodying otherness in ENGLAND and Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel. Tim’s plays are narratively driven but pay as much attention to their form as to their story.