“Fortunate” is the word Shaun Evans uses the most during our con­versation. He is an actor with a thriving career and a host of exciting roles in a variety of programmes under his belt – including the lead in Endeav­our. The show is a prequel to Inspec­tor Morse, where he plays the de­tective at the very beginning of his career in the police.

When I ask about how he dealt with taking on such a well-known role, he says that he is excited by any new venture he is offered.

Evans chose not to base his Morse on the iconic portrayal by the late John Thaw as he believes that the character would have been different in his younger life, and didn’t want to cement his own performance in how Morse seemed in the latter stag­es of his career.

“I didn’t think it would be useful to watch any of the things which had gone before, so I just worked with what I had in front of me […]I looked at the scripts, and I read through some of the books as well.”

As Endeavour is set in the heart of Oxford, I ask Evans what he likes most about our city. He expresses great affection for it – “I love the city centre, I love the architecture, I love the cobbled streets!” Next he praises the organisational skill of the crew which meant that there were no is­sues with being on-set in a busy city.

Endeavour is set in the 1960s, which adds something special to the experience for Evans. He likes the ef­fect it had on the script itself; as “you can’t just text someone, there are no shortcuts”, the plots in Endeavour are made more subtle and well thought through. The context of Endeavour “takes [us] away from our sensibilities.”

Evans also cited the end of the war, the Women’s Lib move­ments and even the contemporary music as things which shape the show.

Evans knew in his early teens in Liverpool that he wanted to act, which is some­thing he is grateful for, as he says that it re­moved a lot of un­c e r t a i n t y from his life and “half of the trouble is making the decision”.

His career is certainly in the lime­light now. Evans says he is fortunate to be offered a choice of interesting parts, and he is lucky that his work has always been exciting.

I wonder if he has his eye on some other iconic roles, perhaps Bond, or Doctor Who? But Evans politely re­fuses; “They’re difficult shoes to fill.” He admires Daniel Craig and Matt Smith, but doesn’t necessarily aspire to play their characters, or Sherlock. Instead, Evans prefers to look for subjects and character traits which he would love to portray, rather than named roles. He says that, to him, great writing means you can “see the world through the prism of what you read.”

Evans enthuses about acting, say­ing he feels he is in the fortunate situation of being able to use his mind creatively in his work. He describes himself as blessed – although people may overuse that word, he truly feels exceedingly lucky in his work.

His fellow actors are sources of in­spiration for him. Malcolm McDow­ell from A Clockwork Orange is one of his favourites, as well as the late Peter Postlethwaite.

He also praises his co-star in En­deavour, Roger Allam, also well-known from The Thick of It, and extols his talent, along with earlier ac­tors like Al Pacino. When I question whether he might maybe want to join Allam in comedy, he replies that he is “open to anything”.

Evans is extremely unwilling to limit or define his ambitions, which is very exciting in an actor of his tal­ent and current popularity.

While he may have decided to take Morse in a different direction from John Thaw, it seems likely that Evans will definitely enjoy a career as illus­trious as his predecessor.

They might not always be in the spotlight, but lighting and costume designers are absolutely crucial to the smooth running of any production.

Sean Ford is the lighting director for Life Is A Dream. He says it is “quite different from most student productions in the Playhouse. It’s very surreal, the main characters are in a dream world”.

Sean has considerable work to do as the backdrop doesn’t change throughout the show: any change in mood or atmosphere has to be conveyed through the lighting.

Inspired by the Italian baroque, the lighting is intended to convey a 16th
century feel – the trend back then was for light to come from specific directions rather than simply shining across the room. One side of a face,
for example, would be highlighted, rather than a uniform wash across the actors. Sean says there are people who’ve been doing this for
years, but “a lot is still guesswork”; with lighting one can think of things that “could work” and only be able to tell whether it does or doesn’t once in the venue. “There’s a lot of trial and error”.

Another part of theatre production that is often forgotten about is the role of the costume designer. Rosie Talbot, performing this role for Life is a Dream, says the skills of a good costume designer are flexibility, patience, imagination and the ability to work fast. Value for money in student drama is essential, the idea, therefore, is to create the best effect with the smallest amount of money and that can often mean making something yourself from scratch.

“It’s important to be able to understand characterisation. A costume designer is part of the process of bringing a character to life on stage, as well as helping shape the overall aesthetic of the play. So, it’s important to listen and understand both the brief from the directors and the focus of the play, as well as character motivations and how the actors will play those characters. A costume must be able to move and be as comfortable for the actors to wear as possible.” 

But the basics matter too: “it also certainly helps to know your way around a sewing machine!” she says. 

Life is a Dream “focuses on the boundaries between true life and constructed reality. That required us to make some pretty dramatic costume choices from the beginning to tie in with the themes.” The characters inhabit “a type of dreamspace” which explains the largely monochrome palate of black and white that she has opted for. “I chose to work with fabrics that reflect light in different ways. Sharp contrasts of light, texture, colour and form are part of the overall aesthetic of the play.”

She describes Estrella’s costume as her favourite “Her costume works particularly well alongside the Damas, her Ladies in Waiting.”

Talbot encourages people interested in design to try out costuming. “I dived in at the deep end and took on a whole production but, if you haven’t got that kind of time, designers are often looking for assistants to help create and source costumes and find fabrics. It is an immensely rewarding thing to do and working with actors and directors is never dull!”

On the 2nd April, Spot the Dog’s Birthday Party was performed in the Oxford Playhouse.

The performance was a special one – staged on World Autism Awareness Day, it was designed to make children on the autism spectrum, as well as their parents, feel included and at ease. Spot has been romping about on paper and on screen since the eighties: however, the series was only adapted for stage in 2000. It was first staged at the Playhouse, and this month Spot came home to enjoy a special matinee performance: lighting was less intense so that children who have sensory issues were not distressed, and children could make noise and come and go as they pleased.

The idea of welcoming autistic children into the world of drama has long been championed by autism campaigners. Lizzy Clark is a young actress with Asperger’s Syndrome who played Poppy in the film version of Jacqueline Wilson’s Dustbin Baby. Poppy the character had Asperger’s, and the decision to choose a child with Asperger’s to play her sparked debate across the
dramatic community. 

Lizzy Clark and her mother, Nicky, began a campaign called ‘Don’t Play Me, Pay Me’, the idea being to change how disabled people are represented
onstage and on screen. The campaign took issue with how disabled people’s storylines are often centred around their disability, and – worse – these storylines often involve them needing a non-disabled character’s help. The Clarks’ campaign also challenges the practice of hiring non-disabled actors to play disabled roles. 

The Clarks see non-disabled actors playing disabled characters as the “blacking up of the new millenium”, and yet, five years after the campaign began, we see a non-disabled Luke Treadaway assuming the mantel of Christopher in the West End production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. 

When I tweeted Nicky Clark about this, her reply seemed more measured than her campaign’s rallying cries: according to her, directors should “ideally cast authentically, but always choose the best actor”. However, she stipulated that castings should “always include people with disabilities/impairments”. 

At one point in The Curious Incident, Christopher Boone asks “Is acting a lie?” – for some, Treadaway’s performance of an autistic boy is an unforgiveable untruth.

For the hundredth time, I have to bite back the reply that The Woman in Black isn’t scary at all – it is actually full of bunnies and rainbows.

I’m working as an usher at a the Fortune theatre.There is something especially unique about working in a theatre that has housed the same ghost story for almost a quarter of a century. 

It may, perhaps, seem surprising that this is London’s second longest-running play (The Mousetrap takes first place). It is an extremely simple production with a rather clichéd plot and very few effects, what with (officially) only two actors on the stage and an extremely sparse array of props. 

Part of the explanation may be that the play now seems to be tied to this tiny, old theatre which has, somehow, become part of the set, with rumours of ghosts haunting the building itself. The intimate auditorium lends itself to creating the perfect atmosphere of isolation, on which the play’s suspense-filled moments depend.

The fact that this is a ‘play within a play’ provides a meta-theatrical experience which can be, in turns, both comforting and unsettling. While there may only be two characters on stage most of the time, their lively and occasionally
humorous dialogue means that you soon start to collude with them. You quickly supplement the scarcity of props with your imagination, sharing this experience with the actors as well as your fellow audience members. 

So much of the play relies on the audience’s imagination, which makes the Woman herself much more of a terrifying figure: the boundary between reality and fiction becomes blurred. Indeed, this probably explains why there are myths surrounding the play itself. There are always a few audience members adamant that no aisle seat is safe, or convinced that they saw something out of the corner of their eye. It may be set in another era but the investment of the audience’s minds in the events on stage maintains a timeless connection, enthralling you in a way that few other plays can do. The active role, that the audience has no choice but to take, is what, primarily, explains its continued existence in the West End. It is what makes this play worth not just seeing, but experiencing.

In her debut novel, published this April, Meike Ziervogel reinvigorates a topic that has been visited countless times before. Magda sees the rise and fall of Nazi Germany through the perspectives of three women: Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister, her daughter Helga, and her mother. Effortlessly unifying fact and fiction, Ziervogel’s exclusive use of female perspective to broach the subject of life under Nazi rule is a bold decision that pays off; Magda becomes as much about destructive mother-daughter relationships as it is about Hitler’s innermost circle of Nazi associates, and is a novel with deeper reaching implications because of it.

The author’s portrayal of how it is impossible to grow up untainted by the cruelties of Nazi rule is brutal; she masterfully exposes how the concept of childhood is distorted and broken in the suffocating confines of Hitler’s bunker, putting the reader in the difficult position of empathising with the enemy. Heavy irony abounds in Magda; the use of ‘Dear Gretchen’ to begin the diary account of Helga’s experience of growing up confined in Hitler’s bunker draws a painfully bitter parallel with Anne Frank’s own ‘Dear Kitty’, collapsing the conventional dichotomies between victim and oppressor the reader may expect.  This is part of Ziervogel’s intention to show how every relationship in the novel is toxic, the characters’ capacity for love eaten away by the awareness that their lives as the most powerful and untouchable citizens in Germany are coming to an end.

Where Ziervogel really shines is in her expert handling of the narrative’s chronology; weaving back and forth over different points in the three women’s lives, she enables the reader to piece together an innate understanding of the motives behind Magda Goebbels, the woman who was capable of murdering her six children when she knew Germany has been defeated. While this makes for uneasy, and sometimes agonising reading, the end result is worth it; one comes away unable to forget Ziervogel’s haunting insight into one of the Nazi’s most notorious female members.