It was Fringe by name, and Fringe by nature this year at Edinburgh’s International Arts Festival. With more artistic haircuts, woolly cardigans and chunky glasses than Babylove’s wildest dreams, the Royal Mile was a haven for all those culturally inclined for the entirety of August. A little pretension never hurt anyone, but there certainly would have been some major casualties in Scotland’s capital if it did.
Amidst the frantic flyering and self-promotion from the endless roll-call of performers desperate for their X Factor-style big break, the University of Oxford and its thespian darlings were clawing their way to the front. With five a cappella groups warbling away in the key of Glee, the Imps and Revue flying the flag for comedy and the inaugural Bookstacks project piled high with serious theatre, Oxford didn’t disappoint in terms of quantity.

Quality wise, the Oxford drama scene’s offerings at the Fringe were uniformly impressive, ranging from the musical (Out of the Blue’s annual Fringe extravaganza) to the magical (Keble’s Simon Kempner psychologically gripping show SIL3NC3), and plays including Awful Pie Theatre’s Ubu, and ONEOHONE Theatre Company’s series of interactive experiences that push conventional theatre boundaries.
Exhausting as it may be, the Fringe is a genuinely unique and exciting experience for anyone at all interested in the dramatic arts. A fixed smile for the all-too-often excruciatingly awkward comedy shows is a must though, as is an appetite for the occasional deep fried Mars bar. The vibrant atmosphere in the streets conjures the Festival’s real magic: the street performers; the Scottish weather; the dauntless enthusiasm of bright young things crying out ‘five star show’ up and down the Mile; more comedy than even Bob Hope could feign enthusiasm for in introduction; and more than a healthy trifle of pretension, all taken with a generous pinch of salt, make for a summer that’s really something.

As you take your seat you will first notice a cat in tight black furs playing a violin and swinging on the bars of a cage. A Soviet-style placard will boast the name of the capital where the action takes place: MOCKBA (Moscow).

The setting is 1930s USSR in the arrogant age of atheism. But with the arrival of the Devil and the recent ‘publication’ of a work on Pontius Pilate, the Soviet characters of the play are thrown into the dark and twisted world of the religious and the magical.

The whole design of the play is clever and sexy, with ostentatious make-up and costumes against a minimalist backdrop. A great performance of Margarita by Cassie Barraclough conveys the stifling atmosphere of this bureaucratic nation; she is a woman struck down by love for her Master, a severe hero character played by Ollo Clark. The fated lovers must have dealings with the ominous crowd of the Underworld in order to at last regain their freedom.

The plot is slightly unhinged by the rapidity of the story-telling, and the jumps between dialogue and musical farce are disorientating, but none of these criticisms weaken the play as a whole. The play is not in real-time and may be deemed complicated, but my advice to the viewer would be to leave rationale behind at the box office to become submerged in this world of madness and beauty.

My Edinburgh was dominated by two activities: rehearsing, and handing out flyers. Rehearsals are straightforward, flyering a little more hit and miss.

August in Edinburgh is not that cold, especially not if you’re running between endless venues with a packed must-see schedule. Posing outside for several hours in a row, whilst wearing very little, is more of an endurance test. That’s perhaps the best way to describe flyering. For just how long can you withstand the cold? How long can you bear to be blanked by hundreds of passers by? Saying the same thing so often that even when you aren’t meant to, you get the urge to hand out flyers in the street. We are just a few of hundreds walking about the city trying to sell ourselves.

We tried to be subtle: no walking up to members of the public with a transfixed zombie stare, no singing and dancing. Instead, the actors form a sort of vignette. Byron and his five prostitutes all tarted up against the door of a church. An eye-catching background with eye catching – er – costumes. In sunshine and in rain.

There is probably no magical formula to succeed in this rather mundane activity. It’s almost luck if one of hundreds passing through the main streets comes to the play. Reams and reams of what we give out is probably not read, blending in with a crumpled pocketful of being just too polite to say no. So we cross our fingers, grit our teeth against the biting wind, lamenting that student theatre is not as easy to sell as Charlie and Lola the play, or just how much we took the Drama Officer Bulletins for granted.

Ask a friend to name the authors on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. Likely responses include incomprehension, embarrassed apology, and the sort of blagging honed by the tutorial system. It’s a sad state of affairs for one of the world’s most prestigious awards for fiction.

Is it simply the case that our passion for books is significantly weaker than our interest in music and film? Certainly there’s less glamour, and this year’s Booker judges seem to have deliberately avoided celebrity writers. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, both titans of modern British fiction, were nowhere to be found on the longlist. Then, the best-selling new novel from David Mitchell, one of the few household names remaining, didn’t make the shortlist. Sir Andrew Motion, chairman of the judges, said simply ‘we didn’t like it enough’. This will have hurt Mitchell’s pride, but not necessarily his sales. His earlier novel Cloud Atlas sold well off the back of a Booker nomination and – more importantly – the recommendation of the Richard and Judy Book Club. Novels need all the publicity they can get, but it seems a sorry indictment of British culture that daytime TV hosts have become literary kingmakers.

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The Booker prize has recently tried to slow the erosion of its stature. This year it has given out over 18,000 books to freshers at Imperial College, and the universities of Newcastle, Liverpool, St Andrews and East Anglia. The choice of universities is surely tactical. With a New College alumnus tipped to win with a dense, avant-garde exploration of human and technological communication, the prize must be careful not to appear merely the self-affirming instrument of literary high society. Despite the naivety of expecting freshers to settle down with a book within their first few weeks, it is without doubt a worthwhile initiative. Lorna Hutson, Head of the School of English at St Andrews, is effusive in her praise. Discussion groups were filled with students from all subjects; one could hardly hope for a better advertisement for the novel.

We all do enough reading for our subjects that the thought of another page of text is understandably unappealing, even if it is fiction. This saturation must be responsible in part for the low profile of the Booker prize at university. So too the bubble in which student life can exist. Perhaps there is also a countercultural element – just how fresh and vital is the talent put on display by the judges? Depending on one’s perspective, an unprecedented third victory for Peter Carey could be cause for dismay or for delight.

The Booker prize shouldn’t be criticised too quickly, however. Parrot and Olivier in America, Carey’s meditation on friendship and politics, has the makings of a modern classic. The Finkler Question finds one of Britain’s finest Jewish writers at full tilt. Jewish writers have been hugely influential in shaping modern American fiction, and a victory for Howard Jacobson could have real significance here.

When asked about the prize one Jesus English student said, almost seriously, ‘I only read dead authors’. It is true that literary prizes can fall prey to passing fashions. That was the appeal of the recent Lost Booker competition: forty years later, it was quite clear that JG Farrell’s Troubles had stood the test of time. Many writers – not least Philip Pullman – have bemoaned the recent pred ominance of present-tense narration in Booker shortlists. The author of the Northern Lights trilogy calls the technique ‘an abdication of narrative responsibility’. You’ll have to read the novels to decide whether you agree. That is the enduring beauty of literary prizes.

If you were hoping to see Murder in the Cathedral next week, then make other plans. The show has sold out weeks before its opening performance. This could be for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the show’s cast of nineteen has massively oversized families. Or T.S. Eliot fans have turned out in droves to see his rarely performed play. Or it could because director Tom Littler has returned to Oxford with a cast of students and professionals to stage unprecedented performance in an unprecedented space.

Next week, Thomas Becket will die nightly in Christ Church Cathedral, brought to life by Eliot’s metered verse and the Cathedral’s echoing nave. While an Oxford student reading English, Tom Littler directed dozens of shows, ranging from Shakespeare to A Streetcar Named Desire. But his vision of putting on Murder in the Cathedral while studying at Oxford was never realized. Years later, his dream to stage Eliot’s play at Christ Church is coming true through a cast and production team of both current and former Oxford students.

During his daily nine-hour rehearsals, Littler gently interrupts the rhythmic dialogue of the Chorus; ‘Sometimes scenes come at you like a tiger, don’t they?’. Littler doesn’t even need to raise his voice or get out of his chair to command the focus of his hybrid cast of students and professionals. In bringing together such a diverse ensemble, Littler as achieved a rare symbiosis: ‘The professionals raise the bar for the students and the students’ energy rubs off on the professionals’. The results are apparent enough in rehearsal; a unified and energized cast that can do justice to what Littler calls ‘Eliot’s masterpiece’.

Littler recalls his time as a student director fondly and with a touch of disbelief; ‘Oxford is a playground for [student] directors. You get to sink your teeth into huge plays. As a professional, you can’t pick what you do. You do plays that aren’t masterpieces. There aren’t that many flawless plays but I was able to direct many of them as a student’.

In returning to Oxford, Littler has the chance to direct a masterpiece again. He looks at Eliot’s play like he’s looking at a sacred text. He is one of a dying breed of directors who reveres the text rather than seeing in it only an opportunity to put his directorial signature on someone else’s work. In stepping beyond of a theatre world that perhaps loves theatrical spectacle more than loving plays themselves, Littler’s Murder revives not only his undergraduate vision but the lost art of knowing a masterpiece when you see one.

The name brings back memories of Grade 3 piano studies, but the music sends you into a hazy daydream. James Blake’s fourth EP is as spacious as the Australian outback, and – like its predecessors – full of glitchy melodies and very satisfying chords. Already at this point in his career, his style is instantly recognisable.

In CMYK, his last release, Blake took cues from J Dilla and Burial, mashing up 90s RnB samples beyond recognition and harmonizing them with synths. Klavierwerke applies the same treatment to Blake’s own voice, to similar but sparser effect. The “lyrics” are barely discernible – although he does seem to be saying “Cherwell” in the title track – and the vocal snippets instead function as the textural counterpart to the keyboard.

The third instrument is silence, and Blake plays it like a virtuoso. “Tell Her Safe” is basically a call-and-answer between voice and nothing. Throughout the EP, the pulse comes and goes. Almost gone are the dubstep influences that coloured Air & Lack Thereof; instead we get solitary handclaps, the occasional chime. Blake would be the one to drop 4:33 of silence into a DJ set.

But you won’t hear this EP in a club, because whereas his earlier music wrong-foots dancers with stop-and-start melodies, Klavierwerke is a step further away: it isn’t suited to clubbing at all. It’s a tonic. Soak yourself in it once a day, like you would in a hot, foamy bath – you’ll never need to wash again.