The power of suggestion is everything in Tim Crouch’s remarkable construction, drawing its title from Michael Craig-Martin’s 1973 artwork, which put a glass of water on a gallery shelf and said it was an oak tree. Like Craig-Martin, Crouch asks his audience to have faith in order to find meaning in what follows.

Crouch sets up a story where he plays a stage hypnotist who killed a 12-year-old girl by running her over. A year later, the girl’s father visits the hypnotist’s show and volunteers to join him on stage. Rather than dramatise a naturalistic confrontation, Crouch invites a different actor who doesn’t know anything about the show to play opposite him, feeding them lines through various means. At this performance, Crouch’s foil was award-winning Scottish actor Nicole Cooper who was, as Crouch rightly pointed out, brilliant.

As too is Crouch’s revival of a show he first brought to Edinburgh in 2005, and which remains a mesmeric and at times emotional meditation on blind faith, loss, grief, transformation and the belief in something beyond what we might think we’re seeing. Like the hypnotist’s volunteers, the audience becomes complicit (or not) in an exercise fired by the imagination, but which transcends its meta-theatrical roots to become something both devastating, mind-expanding and unmissable.
An Oak Tree, Lyceum Theatre, until 27 August, 8.30pm.