Tim Crouch (born 18 March 1964) is a British experimental theatre maker, actor, writer and director. His plays include My Arm, An Oak Tree, ENGLAND, and The Author. These take various forms, but all reject theatrical conventions, especially realism, and invite the audience to help create the work. Interviewed in 2007, Crouch said, "Theatre in its purest form is a conceptual artform. It doesn't need sets, costumes and props, but exists inside an audience's head."

Stephen Bottoms, Professor of Contemporary Theatre & Performance at the University of Manchester, has written that Crouch's plays "make up one of the most important bodies of English-language playwriting to have emerged so far in the twenty-first century... I can think of no other contemporary playwright who has asked such a compelling set of questions about theatrical form, narrative content, and spectatorial engagement."

Holly Williams, writing in The Independent in June 2014, says, "Crouch has built a name for himself as one of British drama's great innovators, with plays that have disturbed and challenged the passive theatrical experience."

Crouch, originally from Bognor Regis, did a BA in drama at Bristol University and a postgraduate acting diploma at the Central School of Speech and Drama. While still at Bristol, he co-founded the theatre company, Public Parts, with his wife, the director and writer, Julia Crouch. They worked on eight devised productions, which were performed in "all sorts of venues - from caves in Gloucestershire, to prisons, schools, and major national theatres like the Bristol Old Vic, West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Bush in London." Public Parts shows included an adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, and The Marvelous Boy, about the poet Thomas Chatterton. As an actor, Crouch also performed in a number of plays for the Franklin Stage Company, New York, and the National Theatre, London, where he was an Education Associate.

Crouch wrote his first play, My Arm, as a reaction to his increasing frustration with contemporary theatre, in particular "its adherence to notions of psychological and figurative realism and its apparent neglect of the audience in its processes." He told The Scotsman, "I gave myself two years to try to make a piece of work, never having written anything before, and over a course of five days in 2002 I wrote My Arm. I wrote it almost without thinking. Looking back on it, I can see I was writing about all the frustrations I had been experiencing."

My Arm tells the story of a boy who, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, puts his arm in the air and keeps it there for thirty years. In the process, he becomes a celebrated medical specimen and an icon of the New York art scene. In his introduction to the published play, Crouch wrote, 'The boy's action is more meaningful to others than to himself. His arm becomes the ultimate inanimate object onto which others project their own symbols and meanings.'

This theme of projecting meaning is reflected in the staging. Crouch invites audience members to lend personal possessions, such as keys, jewelry, mobile phones, and photos, which are then cast as "actors", shown on a live video feed. Professor Stephen Bottoms describes the effect of this: "The lack of physical resemblance between the presented objects and the things they are made to represent creates a sense of humorous incongruity, but also allows the audience to bring in personal associations of their own. I recall, in one performance, being strangely moved by seeing a pencil case and a can of body spray bullying the Action Man doll which always stands in as the young 'Tim'. Precisely by not showing us what the bullies 'really' looked like, or having actors 'emote' their aggression, Crouch allowed me to fill in my own responsive associations with the scene described."

My Arm, co-directed by Crouch, Karl James and Hettie McDonald, opened to universal acclaim at the Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Festival in 2003. It was later adapted for BBC Radio 3, winning a 2006 Prix Italia for Best Adaptation in the Radio Drama category.