It is fifteen minutes into the first play, and there is a male fresher rubbing a female fresher with baby oil in front of me. It glistens on his forehead and nose; the warm lights of the Burton Taylor make it thin and drippy.
This is Cuppers 2013, hundreds of freshers’ first – and last – forays into university drama. Often in Oxford you do something arduous and unenjoy- able before receiving a mark you probably care about; Cuppers is unique because you get to do something genuinely fun without giving a shit about whether it’s good or not. The three opening plays of the 2013 line-up were not too professional-looking – the BT sometimes has that effect, especially when your props amount to a onesie, a feather boa and a laptop – but they were a genuine pleasure to watch.
LMH’s Love and Information, written by an ex-student of LMH, was followed by Splashback, an original piece of writing from St Benet’s that chronicled an evening spent in the men’s loos at Bridge with a (slight) feminist twist. Merton brought up the rear with Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, translated from Bertolt Brecht’s original German. As a definite impostor in a very college-based event, I skulked about, looking for stereotypes: I witnessed with my own eyes the rambunctious laddery of St Benet’s set against the studious poise of Merton; I eavesdropped on the Mertonians’ earnest discussions about the quality of translation with the guffaws of the St Benet’s boys still ringing in my ears. The Alterna- tive Prospectus was right after all.
St Benet’s Splashback was filled with quick- paced, Oxford-centric, self-referential laddy humour: it wasn’t madly original but it was funny – although it got a bit less tight towards the end. Merton gave a serious treatment of Nazi Germany with captivating sections of verse: the use of lighting was particularly commendable, although the last scene was a little long. The tone of LMH was somewhere in the middle: they managed to weave the funny in with the seri- ous, all with lashings of baby oil. All three boast- ed drunken sections: the two men urinating against a wall in the St Benet’s play were made for their role; after that, the two pissed pissing Nazis couldn’t match up. The best drunk slurring came, perfectly timed, from an LMH actress.
Apart from the bits which involved hiccupping and swaying, the three plays I saw were almost impossible to compare so I didn’t compare them – good luck judges.
The top ten shows from the festival will play on Saturday 16th November at the Burton Taylor studio
