Student theatre strives to be as professional as possible, but the annual garden play offers something unique: permission to have fun. In Trinity Term, as students pivot between the library and Examination Schools, another ritual takes over college quads. Outdoor productions appear across the city, transforming lawns and gardens into temporary stages. For director and producer Magdalena Lacey-Hughes, these productions represent something increasingly rare in Oxford drama: the freedom to be creative without the pressure of being perfect.
Garden plays are as much a part of Oxford life as exams when the academic year draws to a close. After watching the Queen’s College garden play’s performance of Guys & Dolls on its closing night, I met with its director, Lacey-Hughes, expecting to discuss the challenges of outdoor theatre. Instead, our conversation turned to a bigger question: why does Oxford drama take itself so seriously?
After arriving at Oxford eager to throw herself into student theatre, Lacey-Hughes found the Oxford drama scene surprisingly difficult to navigate. “I never really got my foot in the door until Trinity of first-year,” where she choreographed Fiddler on the Roof, the Queen’s garden play that year. “I think I just really didn’t understand how student drama worked here. It was very confusing because it is super decentralised.” It was through subsequent productions inspired by this one that Lacey-Hughes met George Robson, and the pair collaborated to launch Crazy Child Productions in Michaelmas.
Though her passion for the innumerable opportunities offered by Oxford’s extensive drama scene is tangible when she talks about her projects, she is candid about the anxiety which surrounds the field. Students are deeply invested in producing high-quality work, but that ambition can create its own culture: feedback from Oxbridge Onstage last term noted that “Oxford’s drama is very serious and often quite dark.”
For Lacey-Hughes, part of the issue lies in Oxford’s fixation with professionalism. “I think it comes with the slight pretentious air that everything here has,” she reflects. “There is this real emphasis on putting on plays that have huge legacies so that they can reinterpret themselves.” Over the past year, she has noticed the same impulse when people discuss production companies. “People ask ‘what do you do?’ and you would respond ‘we try to make student drama as professional as possible’. In reality, that is not achievable.”
It’s rather ironic here as Lacey-Hughes is hardly arguing from the sidelines: Guys & Dolls operated on a budget comparable to some Oxford Playhouse productions, complete with a live orchestra and professional technical support. Yet what stood out most was not the scale of the production but its atmosphere, as audience members were pulled onstage, handed props, heckled, and encouraged to become part of the performance. The result was collective enjoyment shared by the case and audience alike.
She attributes her talent for generating fun to her own experience and familiarity with different aspects of productions. “You want to expect a lot from people, but you also have to respect that they have a lot to do alongside rehearsals.” Cast members balanced the production with choirs, rowing, journalism, and exams. Drawing on her role as Welfare Officer for Oxford University Drama Society (OUDS), she believes that “respecting time and making people feel valued in the space is very important.”
What, then, prevents student theatre from embracing that same sense of playfulness? For Lacey-Hughes, the problem is a culture: “I do think that there is a slight lack of understanding and appreciation for things that are just inherently creative.” Looking at the prevalence of tragedies and dramatic reinterpretations of established classics, she argues that Oxford often mistakes seriousness for artistic value. “We think things are only impressive when people are able to cry onstage,” she says, “rather than when they are able to make you laugh.”
Part of this seriousness stems from the structure of Oxford drama itself. For newcomers, success is often less dependent on talent or funding than understanding an unusually decentralised system. Pressure mounts when there is, in fact, a ‘right way’ to produce student drama. “It’s very confusing – you have to know it to be a part of it,” Lacey-Hughes explains. Production companies sit at the centre of that system. Prior to each term they bid for venues, apply for funding, and build reputations over time. The official OUDS advice makes one thing clear: without a Student Production Company, you cannot apply for funding. In theory, anyone can establish one, but the reality is that the necessary experience, contacts, and institutional knowledge often accumulate within established groups, making it easier for some productions to succeed over others.
It is partly this culture which inspired Crazy Child Productions, the company that Lacey-Hughes runs alongside George Robson. Far from the rigidity of other production companies, their company is characterised by an intention rather than a theme. “We are just kind of doing everything really,” she laughs. Their productions range from canonical student dramas such as The Glass Menagerie to student-written and translated work. Lacey-Hughes grins as she tells me about a recent production, Stories From an Abandoned Warehouse, “it was actually the first time Stories has ever been staged in the UK.”
Reflecting on their company’s purpose, she emphasises accessibility: Crazy Child Productions work with students who want to stage a single project without building an entire production company around it. Recent productions have included “some friends who wanted to do one thing and not set up a whole production company,” while Stories was organised by a postgraduate student who did not have the time to establish a whole brand. “We don’t intend to take it out of Oxford,” she says. “We want people to use it and the resources which we have built up.”
The playful nature of garden plays offer escape from these pressures of Oxford theatre. “The pressure is off a bit more,” Lacey-Hughes believes. Freed from some of the expectations attached to studio-based productions, gardens provide space for experimentation: earlier this term, Lady Margaret Hall hosted an unrehearsed performance of Twelfth Night, while St Edmund Hall staged The Harrowing of Hell.26 in a crypt.
The freedom of garden plays stems partly from their refusal to behave like conventional theatre. “You aren’t going to feel as immersed when it is seven o’clock outside, the sun is setting, there’s a bird over there and you can hear the ambulance on the road.” Rather than undermining the experience, she believes these interruptions create a different relationship between audience and performance. “It is a whole different type of world-building,” she explains, “because the immersion is pretty much shattered.”
That freedom comes at a cost. Outdoor productions are technically demanding. Lacey-Hughes explains the difficulties of hiring an external professional in sound design while the weather itself became a concern. “On the first night our orchestra tent was breaking due to the rain,” she recalls. Such a small team meant that “a lot of that fell to me; I was holding up the tent for around two hours on the Wednesday.”
College regulations can limit staging decisions as well, particularly around audience movement and health-and-safety policies. Yet Lacey-Hughes maintains that these restrictions often produce better creative solutions. “One thing I changed this year was bringing the orchestra into view. I wanted them to be there, and it worked for the show itself having them be appreciated.”
“In some ways, you are allowed more creativity because you have a completely different space to work with, but also colleges are much stricter.” In Guys & Dolls, Queen’s itself becomes part of the performance. “The window is a feature each year – it is the thing to look out for,” she says. This year, she reorientated the stage so that the window was on display the whole time; when actors were not using it as part of the set, residents were using it as, well, a window. “Initially I was annoyed,” she laughs. “Then I was like, ‘fine’. We should have started charging them for a ticket.”
The same elements which make garden plays less immersive also make them creatively exciting. “Even a black-box theatre is limited in certain ways,” she argues. “That is what makes creativity really powerful, when you use it well and when you have limitations. You cannot be creative when you have all the opportunities available to you.”
Perfectionism and professionalism are factoring pressures in student societies beyond theatre. In an urge to create portfolios and eagerness to enter industries immediately upon graduation, the rush to seem accomplished appears to overshadow the earnest and crucial learning experience of student societies. In a busy Michaelmas ahead, Crazy Child Productions does not seem to be slowing down: they are bidding for the Oxford Playhouse an O’Reilly show as you read, meanwhile two first-year students have already booked the Burton Taylor Studio. So what do they want their production company to be known for, for their audiences to take away? After a moment’s consideration, Lacey-Hughes responds, “‘You can’t be everything before your time’ is a really cringe answer, but that is definitely part of it.”
