I first came across Sheila Heti during a phase in which I believed Lena Dunham had the answers to everything and was gradually dispensing them through the medium of Twitter. Dunham recommended Heti’s second novel, How Should a Person Be?, as a “metafiction-meets-nonfiction novel” with “a lot of the same concerns as Girls.’’

Suitably intrigued, I wrote to Heti and asked for an interview. By the time the interview rolled around – nearly six months later – I had stopped treating Lena’s feed as a vending machine of wisdom, but the momentum of Heti’s novel had not waned. The prospect of the book’s UK release on January 24th has prompted a slew of reviews and discussion pieces in the British press to rival the critical rumblings already occurring Stateside. While trying to access the New Yorker’s review of the book on my phone last Thursday, I looked across the train to see a man reading a full page on Heti in the Metro.

Two of the most controversial aspects of the book have been the promise of its tagline, “A novel from life,” and the notion that this, whatever it is, represents some sort of new form or type of fiction. Heti recorded conversations between herself and her circle of artist and filmmaker friends on tape recorders, and her book includes transcripts, emails and lists. Though parts are, she says, “fictional”, the work is essentially an autobiography of the artist’s day to day life and social circle since she started the project in 2005.

The Metro’s headline for their review of How Should a Person Be?, “It’s not such a novel idea”, argues against the idea that Heti’s style is in any way new (they even included a helpful box with other examples of writers who wrote “from life”). Yet when I spoke to Heti she seemed under no illusions of originality: “All literature is from life,” she acknowledged, but her method of collecting her material, a method she calls “journalistic,” is what she considers new and “very important” to her writing.

When I ask why she wanted to record her friends and write her book in this journalistic manner, she replied, “So that I didn’t have to be in my apartment all alone while I was writing!” Other friends were documenting the group around the same time: Margaux Williamson, Heti’s best friend in the novel, was making a film, while an artist friend was painting them.

This reveals a key feature of Heti’s life and writing: her desire to make the two almost indistinguishable. When asked whether she had any advice for those wanting to pursue a career in the arts, Heti told me, “I don’t think that thinking of it as a career is beneficial. You expect success and income – you have to go into it expecting none of those things. I think you have to make art all of your life, make it touch every other part of your life, rather than just be this separate thing you go to your desk and do. If you do this, then really all of your feelings and thoughts and experiences go into the art.”

Sheila Heti, and women like Miranda July and Lena Dunham, are achieving a level of critical attention that suggests that the male dominated media and literary world could be changing. When I asked Heti why she thought this could be, she replied: “There haven’t been that many generations where the conditions of life have made it possible for woman to write. At the moment there is more freedom in general to be a woman writer.”

Yet even those with the time and money to write have still struggled: “I remember when I was a teenager it was quite acceptable for people to say ‘I don’t read female writers’ and many people did say that. It’s hard to imagine saying that anymore.” In the prologue of How Should a Person Be? Heti writes, “One good thing about being a woman is that we haven’t got too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.” She’s being characteristically flippant, but she also makes an important point about the opportunities now open to women authors.

While it’s depressing that only now, nearly one hundred years after Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, are we free of the kind of people who “don’t read female writers,” there is an excitement in finding the geniuses previously ignored or dismissed by the world as authors of ‘Chick Lit’. Maybe Lena Dunham’s Twitter feed wasn’t such a bad place to look for the answers.

The problem with Fifty Shades of Grey is that there are only fifty of them. EL James solved this by writing two more bestsellers. The solution from a tiny publishing house in West Yorkshire was to write the prequel, The Secret Life of Christian Grey.

When the publishing news bible The Bookseller got wind of this plan, publishers from around the world began ringing Bluemoose Books. There was one small catch though: they all wanted to see the first three chapters, but Bluemoose Books had only concocted the synopsis.

Under the S&M pseudonym of Dominic Cutmore, Benjamin Myers, a journalist and literary novelist, had to cough up 15,000 words over one weekend. The publishers and film companies continued salivating. They could smell the money.

The book was going to be Cutmore’s memoir of his friendship with Christian Grey, the male lead of EL James’ bestseller, from childhood up to the world of Fifty Shades.

“The words came easy. With character so shallow and archetypal as EL James’s they were fairly simple narrative voices to adopt,” Myers explained. “Where Christian Grey is dominant, successful, confident and so forth, I wrote Dominic as an opposite character: repressed, unambitious, submissive.

“The plot followed the pair’s formative years: school, university, business success, sexual conquests. The rest was just creating situations that Fifty Shades fans would want to read about and which stayed true to EL James’s tenuous plots: parties, international travel, nice restaurants, sex scenes.”

But it all fell apart when Random House realised what was going on and sent their corporate lawyers after Bluemoose Books. Myers wasn’t too upset. He doesn’t boast about his parody either: “A monkey with a typewriter, some coffee and a stack of Jackie Collins novels could construct a passable Fifty Shades pastiche in a fortnight. Just go into a bookshop and count all the other cheap erotica novels that have been rush-released these past few months.” Lovers of the series can pick up a copy of Haven of Obedience or Bared to You or Eighty Days Yellow to satisfy their appetites.

In fact, as a literary novelist, Myers found his “mischievous prank on a fickle industry” depressing. Over the summer his most recent novel was published, and while doing signings in Waterstones stores he spent a lot of time wondering why Fifty Shades, “ham-fisted” as it is, has done so well: he “watched this book furtively selling a few copies every single minute. Most of the buyers seemed to be aged 25-40, white, female. They didn’t buy any other books while they were there.” Not an encouraging sign for the literary world.

Myers concluded that his own The Secret Life of Christian Grey looked so likely to succeed, if only briefly, “because it satisfied a fleeting appetite, adhered to a passing trend for clunky soft porn writing. It is hard not to feel that the publishing business is as trend-driven as Top 40 pop music.” It remains to be seen where the next trend will take us.

“Well there are two types of students who come to Gilbert and Sullivan;
the lunatics and the anoraks.” Despite comments like these from president Bethan Griffiths, her and treasurer Eugene Yamauchi cut a reassuringly normal presence when I met them in the Buttery on a chilly
Tuesday morning.

If you were to venture into the depth of Oxford’s cultural appreciations, the Gilbert and Sullivan society would be a good place to start. The Gilbert and Sullivan society is a group of students that appreciates the works of Sir William
Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (surprisingly), a duo that collaboratively produced fourteen comic operas from 1871-1896.

Gilbert and Sullivan began by producing a short piece together called Trial by Jury, in which Gilbert wrote the words whilst Sullivan composed the music. After that they produced around one opera a year. Although their comic operas were immensely successful, Sullivan always felt they could do better if they wrote serious opera. He wrote one grand opera independent
of Gilbert called Ivanhoe, an adaptation of Walter Scott’s novel.

With around fifty to sixty active members, these students aim to put on one Gilbert and Sullivan production a term. With a cast and chorus of around twenty who rehearse three to four times a week these are no small commitments.

Last term was The Pirates of Penzance, one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most famous productions. It boasted a whole host of terribly serious characters, including a Pirate King, a Major-General, and a chorus of his daughters.

This term it is Princess Ida, a satire of feminism and the Darwinian revolution, being performed in seventh week. Around every five years they reach the end of the canon and then start all over again.

You might wonder how students end up in such a niche society. PPEist Yamauchi played the Pirate King last term whilst Griffiths, a second-year music student, was recruited in her first year.

Of her involvement, she says, “Very early on in my first term I had a friend in the year above who found out I played the piano and asked me to come along. When I said I might be interested his eyes lit up. The next day I was made musical director of the next performance. We generally attract a lot of freshers and a lot of talented performers.”

However, Griffiths insists that “it is not just a performative thing.” Those not involved in performing meet on a weekly basis to singthrough Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Although they tend to meet at the Rose and Crown on
North Parade they will go “anywhere that is quiet and has a piano” and aim to get through the canon every two terms.

There was also talk of a trip to go to a “Gilbert and Sullivan museum” or “a house in Sussex filled with loads of Gilbert and Sullivan memorabilia” not to mention a biennial challenge to sing through all of the Gilbert and Sullivan
musicals in thirty-six hours.

Griffiths describes it as “more interesting than people give it credit for. It is niche, and a bit odd, and although the storylines are fairly similar there is a lot to look at. As a society it’s very close knit, very consistent…a nice little life.”

Princess Ida is showing between Thursday
28th February – Saturday 2nd March (7th week)
at the Corpus auditorium.

Cherwell’s Verdict:
“Philosophy, but not as you know it”

If I asked you to suggest an evening’s thrilling entertainment, I doubt many would respond with irrepressible cries of a race through more than 2000 years of political philosophy. This, however, is Oxford’s latest theatrical offering (only in Oxford, as the cliché goes) promising to combine the theories of influential philosophers with the feel-good songs, exuberant dance, and unapologetic
camp fluffiness that musicals revel in. If philosophy means giant dusty old tomes to you, prepare to have your mind blown in some
kind of pseudo-philosophical paradox.

A Theory of Justice: The Musical follows John Rawls into the time vortex as he searches for answers to his life’s work on Justice, while being both in
hot pursuit of his love interest in the form of attractive student Fairness, and in vivid conflict with his arch-enemy Robert Nozick. Along the way, he breaks into singing dialogue with a whole sequence of philosophers, the style of each giving to the scene its own distinct genre. The genres range wildly: we have a sizzling tango with Rawls and Fairness, a saucy cabaret piece and a trip to a gay club run by Plato the ventriloquist with his effeminate Socrates as doll (that’s a philosophy in-joke there). Even those dreary Victorian Utilitarians get a make-over as a slick barbershop quartet. It’s no joke that Philosophy in-jokes do dominate, but I can assure you that the humour will have everyone laughing. The philosophers will be those noticeable for their giggles continuing a moment or two longer than everyone else.

This is a musical, I hear you say, so where are the spectacles? Pretty much every scene, really. And if that’s not sufficient, prepare to be dazzled by the time vortex, which has demanded the O’Reilly’s biggest lighting budget
ever. In fact, everything you’d expect in a musical is here, from the character stereotypes to the dance. One thing that particularly impressed me is that all of the musical score is original – there’s no amateur business going on here, pinching music from existing musicals and writing philosophical lyrics to it.

Having filled this space with my enthusiasm for the concept, I should say something of the acting: everything I saw was top-notch. I would urge all you non-philosophers to give this intriguing performance a go; and, as for you philosophers, well, you have no excuse!

Cherwell’s Verdict:
“An organic piece of theatre”

It’s a confident producer who can advertise a play not as “a polished final product”, but rather as “a piece of theatre that is alive and growing.” But, however counter-intuitive and humble this might be, it seems to be working.

They Will Be Red is a two-hander: Maisie Richardson-Sellers plays Anna, an ecologist battling the ash tree dieback, while the narrator and every character with whom the ecologist interacts is played by Nick Williams. Despite the commonest use of narrators in drama being in school nativity plays, this actually works quite well. The pace is maintained by rapid interchanges of character for narrator and back again, and the narratorial comments he offers can be very witty.

The flip-side of this is that it makes Williams’s part excruciatingly difficult to play. Within split-seconds he has to morph into another character, and then, barely with time to establish one, he has to change again. There was another fortnight of rehearsals to go when I saw them in action, and Williams needs to work on executing these swaps. I felt that his attempt at Anna’s mother was rather imprecise and needed to be refined.

All these comments about characters and the narrator might imply that there is a stable script to They Will Be Red. In fact, there isn’t, and nor will there be. Each night it’s performed, the cast are aiming to make it about ten per cent different. At the moment only about a fifth has been fixed, and the play is emerging through an unconventional rehearsal process. The cast have been off to Wytham Wood, a university woodland west of Oxford, to play around in the leaves and work out their characters.

The rest of the time is based aroud improvisation, and occasionally a good line or idea will come out of the process that Milja Fenger, the writer-director, will latch on to, and permanently lock into the script. While I was there, they performed a scene where Anna is nine years old, and I was invited to contribute ideas for the cast to improvise around: Richardson-Sellers, not knowing what was coming, seamlessly dealt with my suggestions of Pokémon cards and traffic light jelly.

Unlike most Burton Taylor shows, the set won’t just be a table, two chairs and some paperback books. The trees that Anna loves will be recreated with wooden sculptures and the floor will be covered with several inches of bark.

An organic piece of theatre, this certainly is, but it might end up being far more polished than most BT shows.