“I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger… I saw all these things, and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me.”

Fantastically dark and vivid, Gaiman’s The Ocean at The End of The Lane is a surrealist literary artwork which swallows the reader entirely from within the first few pages. From amongst the chapters jump out a spectacular pantheon of sinister creatures and vanquishers of evil both in parallel worlds and in our own, creating this magically poetic narrative which will remain at the fringes of the reader’s mind long after putting the book down.

The book commences with a young boy witnessing a suicide at the tender age of seven. The unnamed protagonist is immediately plunged into a series of events on his quiet country lane, as his life and that of his family merge with alternative realities which are in constant proximity to the human population of the planet. The adults within the novel seem entirely unaware of the dark forces at play, and fall victim to the manipulative dynamisms of unseen powers, as the young narrator of the tale discusses a couple of his childhood days on which his world, and that of everyone around him, was under the severest of threats. Told with brutal honesty and raw sincerity, the reader is engulfed in the mind of a child perplexed by the masonic secrecy of adulthood: becoming, believing, understanding, thinking entirely as a child once more. This dark fable challenges the reader to return to their own childhoods, to embrace the darkness that lives within and without and to recognise the powerful insight of a youngster.

This captivatingly beautiful short story defies all established conventions, whether of literary genres, the supernatural, or childhood and adult life expectations. It defies all notions of life and death, love, fear, and hatred. It challenges the security of our world, the stability of our society, and the strength of scientific explanations. It reminds us how momentary our lives are; how terrifyingly quickly people can change; how quickly our memories can and will fade and how soon we ourselves will merge into the distant past. Gaiman has opened up a timeless, spaceless void, which enchants and disturbs us, and which draws the reader into a vacuum they may never be able to leave behind. 

Reading your favourite poetry and having it read aloud to you by its writer are very different experiences, as Alice Oswald’s recital as part of Keble’s ‘Meet the Poet’ series showed me. For the first time I was properly aware of the strong internal rhythms and cross-rhythms of poems I thought I knew inside out, watching from the front row as her bright red boot tapped them out and kept their complicated beat. 

I hope that was what she wanted listeners to take away from the performance, given her reply when I ask about the performance aspect a little later on. “I suppose I didn’t really perform my poems at first, but I was always interested in their tunes, and I wanted people to understand a more counterpointed tune than they seem to see on the page.” The intensity of the delivery with which she made these revelations made for a mesmerising hour or so of listening. We’re now crossing Keble’s quad in a dusk that has fallen during the recital, looking for quiet in a tutor’s office. 

Had we stayed at the venue, I would have barely managed to get a word in edgeways: Alice was surrounded by fans looking for in-depth discussion from the moment the applause died away. Despite the amount of sheer effort presumably required to sustain that level of energy for so long, she’s wound up with the excitement of the performance rather than exhausted by it. 

Her work, especially Memorial, drew me to the Iliad and probably put me on the path towards studying Classics in the first place, so I asked whether she has that accessibility, the idea of bringing classical literature to those who wouldn’t normally encounter it, in mind when she writes. “I think I draw on it because I’m obsessed with it,” she begins, “but part of my obsession is that it’s gathered the wrong atmosphere about it – a stodgy, stuffy, public school atmosphere. I’m always really pleased if people can get back some of freshness that I see in the actual Greek, so I’m really delighted if I can draw people to the Iliad.”

Aware that Oswald recently took part in a 12 hour reading of Paradise Lost in her local community, I enquired about whether she thought that those kinds of projects, which bring poetry into people’s lives, are a poet’s duty as a public figure, or whether it’s more her personal pleasure. “I don’t think poets do have duties – I think each poet finds their own duty. For me, I have a great wish not to become too literary, partly again because of Homer – I feel that literariness is quite deadening – so I’m always quite interested in how people survive from one moment to the next without writing, how people live a whole day without writing about it. 

“It’s not something I can do, and I’m really impressed with people who can. Also, I think that what I liked when studying Homer is the feeling that these poems were made by more than one person, and so I’ve always felt that one poet isn’t really enough to make poetry.”

We move on to her rejection of the T.S. Eliot prize in 2011 and the media attention that attracted: specifically whether she sees that kind of attention as a useful platform for bringing issues like the sponsorship of prizes into discussion, or whether she feels that too much focus on the poet as a person can detract from their work. “It’s difficult – of course one has a duty to not shelter in a non-political world. But, frustratingly, anything you say gets distorted, so if you’re not a specialist in those areas, it’s certainly best not to use it as a way of finding a platform. But, at the same time, you just have to do things for yourself.”

I’m so used to hearing her resonant voice on CD recordings or the radio that I’m soon reminded of her latest work, Tithonus, to which I’d listened recently, and its immersive quality; she’d written it over multiple dawns, sat by the riverbank. “I like to be immersed in my subject, but it doesn’t have to be a subject that’s outside in the world. I suppose the reason I focused on the natural world was partly because I was a gardener, but partly because it felt possible to connect to it, and I’m interested in whether it’s possible to grow that and to write about humans.”

Two indications about the next phase of her writing career begin to emerge. Oswald, it seems, would like to go more into the freedom of the mind rather than the concreteness of the world. She also now wants to focus on poems that aren’t necessarily designed for performance, aware that it’s becoming quite limiting to think that whatever she writes must be performed. They go in radically different directions to her previous work, but she is easily capable of managing such a change. 

“A voice,” she says, “is something that you have to grow – it’s not a stationary thing. If you write poems, you then have to grow a voice that can get to be big enough to say everything.” 

The Oxford University Gilbert & Sullivan Society weekly email is a guilty pleasure of mine. Though yet to attend a single meeting, the regular dose of comic opera silliness – the cocktail of one part innuendo to two parts gin – on which their society apparently subsists has long brightened my inbox. So the opportunity to see the group in action, at Monday’s previewed performance of Iolanthe, was not one that I would willingly miss.

Excitingly, what I discovered in the Corpus Christi auditorium was not simply a dramatic society brought together by Mother’s Ruin and fairly niche Victorian satire but an eager collection of immensely talented actors and singers preparing for a genuinely hilarious production.

For background, Iolanthe is a raucous comic opera satirising the House of Lords through the medium of fairy mischief and sexual frustration – calamities which doubtless touch us all.

It is brilliant.

Under the direction of Zoe Firth – a woman almost visibly bubbling over with enthusiasm – I was shown eight or so numbers from various sections of the show, each one alive with dynamic choreography and excellent choral performances. The standard of singing in Iolanthe is near to faultless, with each of the leading roles well cast, and performed with satisfying individuality: the Lord Chancellor (Will Momsett) cuts a pompous but quivering figure, while the Fairy Queen (Emilia Carslaw) balances the fearsome and lovelorn facets of her character with ease.

Scenes involving the fairy troupe are demure and ridiculous in equal measure, while the chorus of peers are a lecherous, bureaucratic delight; no joke about the impossibility of a House of Lords selected by ‘brains’ is likely to pass without winks and nods. The Earl of Mountararat (Fergus Butler-Gallie) is particularly entertaining during these political scenes, blustering through with all the ostentation of a blue-blooded Brian Blessed.

In terms of staging and costumes, the society president, Sophy Tuck, informed me that there will be “a full roof screen” for the backdrop during the run and that the pews and aisles of St John the Evangelist’s will be employed in performance, suggesting that the audience themselves may become peers in the Lords’ chamber. While the full wardrobe of costumes was not due until a later rehearsal, if the bright, flowing ensembles worn on Monday by Phyllis (Chloe Fairbanks) and the Fairy Queen are any indication of quality, then the final result will be stunning.

Even as we shuffled out into post-preview rain the cast’s energy was impossible to dampen – surrounded by a mish-mash of bizarre dialogue about “men with mothers too young for them”, as well as arias on frogs and “good Queen Bess”, I couldn’t help but wish I’d been able to see the whole thing.

If you enjoy cheerful bureaucracy, giggling at naughty words, ‘”very susceptible chancellors”, and/or genuinely first-rate vocal talent then Iolanthe is not a show to miss this 8th Week.

”Untruthful! My nephew Algernon? Impossible! He is an Oxonian.”

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is frequently performed, but being a play of some fame, rarely experimented with quite to the extent that St Hilda’s College Drama Society is doing in 7^th week. Whilst keeping the original script, the actors are dressed in modern attire, send text messages instead of telegrams, and Lady Bracknell raises her eyebrows at the iPad that deftly replaces her notebook. Andrew Crump positively struts around on stage, sporting a black leather jacket, as a suave yet extremely annoying Algernon Moncrieff – permanently getting on the nerves of his (spoiler alert) little brother, the periodically flustered Jack Worthing (Callum Luckett). Crump describes his character as “fun to have around, but not really fun to be with,” something Luckett, reaching unsuccessfully for his leopard print cigarette case, heartily agrees with.

The reverberating voice of the reverend Chasuble, as he preaches his “sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness [which] can be adapted to almost any occasion,” floats above the variously prejudiced and posturing cast members with utter gravity, depriving the situation of its last chance of seriousness.  What does infuse the play with a hint of tragedy is Miss Prism’s confessional account concerning a handbag, a perambulator and “the manuscript of a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality” recounted in a heartbreaking manner by Laura Gledhill.

And then there is of course Lady Bracknell, delivering such gems of Wilde’s subversive wit as: “To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it have handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life which reminds one of the worst excesses of the French revolution, and I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?” Or, on occasion, delightfully confirming the axiom that divorces are indeed made in heaven: “I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people an opportunity of finding out each other’s characters before marriage. Which I think is never advisable.” But perhaps the most relevant of her pearls is that: “The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.”

The director, Lata Nobes, feels that “it can be a distraction to focus on the 19^th century setting which removes the play from the relatable, and detracts from Wilde’s masterful writing which pokes fun at ideas of social conformity and the so called intellectual”; both extremely relevant for a performance in Oxford. She continues, that the gender blind casting has led to an absolutely dazzlingmale Lady Bracknell (Iarla David Manny) and two female butlers (Alex Barasch and Ellen Gibson). As Nobes says, “highly appropriate for the week following St Hilda’s Gender Equality festival, adding a new dimension to a play written by one of the most famous LGBTQ writers.”

Comedy with Cucumber Sandwiches (a.k.a The Importance of being Earnest) will be taking place on the 7^th 8^th and 9^th of March, 7:30pm, on the stage Jacqueline du Pré Music Building.