In their latest attempt to demonstrate their Neanderthal moral values, Wahoo recently presented us with the opportunity to enjoy a ‘Country Estates and Council Estates’ fancy dress night. Next week, the esteemed discothèque will hopefully give up the pretence altogether and throw a jamboree with a ‘Golliwogs and Golly Gosh, Aren’t We Privileged’ theme.

We all know that Wahoo are morons and put on terrible club nights. But in more general terms, the visualisation of the council estate by the British media often follows a depressingly familiar trajectory.UK hip-hop legend Skinnyman’s track ‘Council Estate of Mind’ speaks to this sense of anger and alienation with its depiction of an urbanised and utterly isolated mindset.

His illustration of poverty on the estate is grimly compelling: “I live amongst smashed syringes/squatters’ doors hanging off they hinges/hookers looking for Bobby/shotting in they minges”. Even the phrase ‘sink estate’ is derived from the biological notion of ‘behavioural sink’, a collapse in animal behaviour when population density passes a critical tipping point. Originally modelled on rats, it has subsequently been mapped onto the poor of Britain.

The original biological report speaks of “a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep”. It is difficult not to be reminded of ASBOs forbidding people to leave the house after daylight hours, and histrionic calls for blanket curfews from the right-wing media.

Skinnyman also acknowledges this fear when he raps: “Blud, you go to sleep round here and have nightmares/wake up and find the worst reality is right there”. The dehumanising implication is clear. Crowd the rats together and they will start to eat each other: crowd the poor together and they will rob and kill each other.

Of course, there is a distinction to be drawn between Skinnyman’s legitimate depiction of the urban decay of Britain and the lazy stereotyping of Matt Lucas’ shellsuit-clad abomination Vicky Pollard. It would be irresponsible to submerge the hardships of life in many of our council estates under a deluge of cheery community spirit.

Admittedly, TV shows like Misfits and Shameless might attempt to map warmth and humanity onto the streets of London and Manchester, but there is a fine line between well-meaning and affectionate caricature and cruel stereotype. In 2012, Southwark council banned film crews from two of its estates, sick of being depicted as the worst of our society condensed into a handful of towerblocks. For the people of Southwark, the line was overstepped once too often.

“What I don’t expect you to ever comprehend is/why I got all actin’ so self-defensive”, Skinnyman raps. In the sneering distinction Wahoo are drawing between country estates and council estates, one is implicitly worse. 

Council estate dwellers are depicted as nothing but animals, the same vermin the rich hunt on their country estates. If you wouldn’t go to Wahoo in blackface, you shouldn’t be going to Wahoo in Burberry and fake gold chains. As long as they keep perpetuating this poisonous mockery of the working class, perhaps we shouldn’t be going to Wahoo at all.

I am art. I am creator. I have ‘originality’ written through me like a stick of Brighton rock. Day to day, I create. Afterwards, I comment on others’ creations, and try to trick people into thinking I am an intellectual.

Sadly, my barbed comments about others’ art are not always heard, however loudly I spit them out in the echoing recesses of the Tate. My diet of crumpets and gin, though charmingly eccentric, has left me malnourished and emaciated. I can’t wait to get back to Oxford for a hearty brunch and a glass of port. For the past weekend, I have been living with a group of art students living in a filthy flat in Finsbury Park. Alliteration aside, mine is a dismal state of affairs.

The flat is paid for by a combination of parental handouts, student loans and sheer luck. Bills are not included in the scandalously low rent, but no one knows who pays for the gas or electric. The tenants don’t ask and the landlord doesn’t tell. They think he keeps bodies in the boiler room but no one pushes it: it adds, they think, to the flat’s mystique.

The floor is littered with paint palettes and fag ends. Days are spent in artistic frenzies and everyone has a drinking problem. It quickly becomes clear to me that each artist is treading the thin line between art and masturbation, but only one flatmate has addressed this explicitly in his work: he recently filmed himself wanking delicately into a human skull. The footage received a wink and a thumbs up from his tutor. No one knows why.

The artist I am shadowing is named Marcus, a friend of a friend who returns to his pleasant house in Surrey on the weekends when he needs his washing done. His art school friends are intolerably hip and relentlessly opinionated. Pre-drinks end with definitive proclamations about the role of the artist, and people have been known to leave when Marcus misdefines colour theory. The paintings that germinate in their dust-lined living room do not necessarily retain value outside of it, although Marcus’s grandmother buys an abstract imagining of a penis every Christmas.

My companion tires of me rapidly. I am neither attractive enough nor weird enough to be his muse. I am also in the way: when trying to create my own masterpiece, I get oils on the inside of Marcus’ flatmate Cosmo’s overalls. Oils on the inside of overalls defeats the purpose of overalls, he snarls, and I am consigned to the kitchen like a mucky dog.

Between 4 and 11am, Cosmo paints, overalls askew. The look in his eyes is that of a wolf eying alamb at 50 paces. He has one goal, and that is to create what he is currently imagining. He looks ridiculous as he scrutinises his work at dawn through turpentine-stained fingers, but he is entirely independent. The first and only person he wants to impress is himself.

It is this thought that prevents me from boarding the Oxford Tube with an entitled  spring in my step. This term’s hard-won tally of good essays is anathema to Cosmo. My tutor’s lazy ticks and reluctant praise seemed pivotal in Oxford, but now they leave me cold.

 I become aware that my course is based on replication and analysis, while Cosmo creates. The 2500 recycled words a student churns out each week on Chaucer or Sartre or Locke are fine, but no undergrad will ever consecrate a week of his or her life to my work unless, like Cosmo, I actually create something.

Two lovers stand at either end of the stage, guns aimed at each other’s heads. They fire, the lights drop. The remainder of the play narrates Anna and Gabe’s journey toward this climactic point – their meeting in a suicide support group, their turbulent relationship and suicide pact– returning full circle at the end. A pleasing, but predictable framing structure.  

“Lover’s Suicide”, written by James Biondi, is one of the four plays to have won Oxford University Drama Society’s New Writing Festival and a coveted slot in the Burton Taylor Studio.

Student scriptwriter Biondi’s aim was to create a piece that told an old story in a new way. It is an hour-long exploration of suicide, love, isolation and death through the characters of Gabe, a struggling writer with little direction in life and Anna, a pharmacist with a tendency towards pill overdoses. However, it seems that in his attempts at originality, the scriptwriter got stuck somewhere between comedy and seriousness, because the play is neither uproariously funny nor particularly poignant.

On to the script. There are certainly some moments of clever dialogue. “If it weren’t for suicidal people I would want to kill myself”, Anna asserts. Work that one out… And moments of humour, too. Gabe concludes his romantic guitar serenade to Anna with a very unromantic “I need a wee”. Mostly, though, the script is mundane and unexciting.

On the whole, the acting is good, especially in the more minor roles. Nathalie Wright gives a sympathetic performance as Gabe’s lonely, concerned and slightly wacky mother and Doug Taylor is very comical as the pink-floral-shirt-wearing eager-to-please support group leader. The main roles are weaker. Though they are playing supposedly suicidal personalities, neither Gabe (Calam Lynch) nor Anna (Jenny Flynn) come across as convincingly depressed and their acting is a bit too reminiscent of A-level drama. Their decision to end each other’s lives is almost as forced as their sporadic snogs.

The conclusion is not at all satisfying. Of course, suicide always leaves the living with questions. But none of the characters in the play are developed enough to give the audience enough food for deep analysis. It feels like the writer simply hasn’t finished thinking it through – and ends only on a note of lazy ambiguity.

There’s something pretty Oxfordy about roman numerals in a title. Just like there’s something pretty Oxfordy about a “devised play”; a production that fights back against the notion that a script-writer “is God”, and that sees itself as on the edgy side of modernism. “We don’t want to do a play that’s just people round the table having troubles”, co-director Thomas Bailey tells me.

But the first scene I’m shown is precisely that. Mother (Lamorna Ash) and father (Sam Ward) replicate the empty routine of table conversation between a married couple, finishing each other’s sentences with a heavy clunk of the cutlery and frozen turn of the head. Then repeat. The second time round the scene is less interesting but more disconcerting – I think I’m finally experiencing the theatrical cliché of “alienation”, bandied around so much but rarely experienced. On the third time round , the sentence-finishing gets confused. “Have you cooked the…” “kids?” I’m not sure if I’m supposed to laugh or not. It’s either very profound, or very funny.

Or both. The other director, Tommo Folwer, assures me that for all its preoccupation with “fear”, these devised scenes also make up a comedy. They show me a scene which takes place inside the mother’s head, in which she goes to a family planning clinic having decided that she wants to “get rid” of her son. How long has it been? 16. Weeks? Years. “I’ll put him down as a ‘severe irritation’ Madam”.

I’m privy to three or four excellent scenes but remain unsure how the whole thing will hang together. The acting is undeniably excellent – apparently the cast spent vast amounts of time acting one another so it’s no wonder they’re all marvellously in sync. A moment of improvisation, in which the mother interrupts her son mid-flow on his vivid but debauched virtual life, brings a new fragility to the stage that I’m not sure is ideal just a week before the show opens. The team don’t seem fazed; “this is a classic rehearsal in that these two have never done this before”.

And how does a series of fragmented scenes come to an end? Thomas Bailey explains that his devised play can never really come to any kind of conclusion, because that would counteract the ultimate message of production: “we’re all essentially terrified of chaos”. I’m still pondering this statement as I leave, and the cast return to one of the calmest and most focused rehearsals I’ve ever seen.