Recently, I have been getting an absolute earful from my editors. It is very important for a student newspaper to look interesting and aesthetically engaging – you need bold colours and striking shapes. As a stage editor, I have very limited responsibility; we just have to fill a single page with previews and reviews and a slightly self-indulgent opinion piece. However, despite the relatively small amount of content we have to produce, we find ourselves struggling desperately to find the very smallest splash of colour in the monochrome wasteland of minimalist rehearsal and production pictures. Posters and marketing have tended in recent weeks towards the increasingly impactful and hard-hitting, but even then they lack that splash of colour that my elders and betters at this newspaper so desperately yearn for.
The real culprit in the endless arms race which will inevitably lead this page towards a singularity-esque absence of any light whatsoever comes from rehearsal pictures.
Look, we get it, the pure emotive power of this production is absolutely unparalleled. It can and will make you think about your life in ways which you could never have even conceived of before you went to see it. If we take that as read vis-à-vis all of Oxford drama, will you please, for the love of God, stop making all of your production pictures black and white?
I’ve been looking back through every single production photo that [email protected] has ever been sent by a marketing manager, a producer or very keen cast member, and I found literally one single colour photograph (I’ll let you guess which one it was, but it might be just a few inches to the right of where your eyes are currently directed). I know it isn’t really any of my business, and we’re merely here to provide the legions of merry punters with informed opinions about Oxford drama, but please can we get some more colour photos?
