If you haven’t heard of the OUDS New Writing Festival, don’t worry. You shouldn’t have. Until last year, the festival consisted of a paltry six plays submitted by students who scribbled some dialogue in their notebook when they should have been taking notes in Shakespeare lectures.

But last year, for reasons unknown, the festival exploded into an actual honest-to-God festival, a massive thirty-eight play competition. The OUDS Committee was forced to pull all-nighters, reading all thirty-eight plays and whittling the stack down to about a dozen.
These dozen scripts were then passed on to the Soho Theatre’s literary associate, Helen Eastman. Eastman pulled an all-nighter, and cut the pile down to six. These were in turn forwarded to the super-playwright Michael Frayn, of Copenhagen fame. It is not known how well he slept that night. But four battered and coffee-ringed scripts staggered onto the BT stage last Hilary, representing the gleaming cream of Oxford playwriting.

And now the circus is beginning again, and the OUDS Secretary has a message for hopeful new writers: ‘Write! Please write! Submit! It’s the chance of a lifetime that happens only once a year! Do it! Write! Stop reading this article and start writing!’. If you are still reading this article, you should know that there are enticing rumours of playwright Christopher Hampton and director Trevor Nunn being asked to judge the Festival this year which might actually make this a chance of a lifetime if you fancy two of the biggest names in theatre reading over your script.

For any of you who missed last year’s NWF and are scratching your heads for inspiration, a safe bet would be to do a remix of last year’s four finalist plays to make sure you cover all the bases. The Cherwell has helpfully provided you with a basic outline for you to flesh out individually:

Act 1: Don’t have your main character ever come on stage. Have all your other characters talk about her and her conspicuous absence. If it’s a boy, have them talk about his penchant for wanking or bribing women with pizza.

Act 2: Enter Odd Character Inexplicably Wearing Wig and Heels. This one should be a boy, for the effect to really hit home on your audience. Channel Beckett with lines like, ‘What if?’ ‘If what?’ ‘Who, you?’ ‘Me. Who?’

Act 3: Then have a brief interlude with a new character who does magic tricks. It would be nice to give one of the smaller characters a corresponding monologue about something along the lines of God/Life/Escape/Death accompanied by physical theatre-style gestures.

Act 4: Then have Incredibly Attractive Woman enter in a ballgown. Make her do the splits and do a poetry-slam style version of a Shakespearian monologue.

Act 5: Let it be disturbingly interrupted by a boy describing a woman’s breasts. Channel Beckett again and require that this goes on for at least six minutes. Have Attractive Woman do a backflip into this boy’s arms. Play a Regina Spektor song and have all the other characters drink Strongbow. DO NOT bring on the absent main character at all costs. Lights out.

The deadline for the New Writing Festival submissions is Friday of 5th week. Email [email protected] with any questions. Visit www.ouds.org/New_Writing_Festival for rules of entry.

Animated films always seem to fit into two different camps; either they are awful cash cows (‘A Shark’s Tale’, ‘Shrek 3’) or they are true labours of love (‘Toy Story 3’, ‘Shrek’). It has become a rare find to watch an animated children’s film that takes the middle road, but ‘Despicable Me’ is it. Not revolutionary, but not something that has been quickly made to fill a gap in schedules.

‘Despicable Me’, like Pixar’s ‘The Incredibles’, is set in a comic-book like setting where villains exist, but strangely there is no caped crusader or masked vigilante in sight. In fact, being a villain is its own profession, with paid minions and a Bank of Evil to get loans from. Gru, voiced by Steve Carrell, is not the sort of villain that you would send Jack Bauer after; styled like a French cartoon character, his most evil acts seem to be stealing monuments from Vegas or bursting children’s balloons. Saying this, his big plot of the century is to steal the moon and then sell it back for fame and fortune, and to help him with this he has the great inventor, cockney Dr Nefario, expertly voiced by Russell Brand. And of course he also has his army of yellow, worm like minions. These numerous minions are reminiscent of the game Lemmings – they act as very effective comic relief. With all the ‘Looney Tune’ like physical gags as well as cute voice work and costumes, the minions are easily the second best part of the film, with the greatest part being the orphans Margo, Edith and Agnes. These 3 girls provide the heart of the film, as they are all so sweet together with Gru that they create the warmest moments that will melt your heart.

Outside of this Gru/orphans dynamic, the film ends up being pretty run-of-the-mill, which makes it rather dull at times. The supporting cast of Jason Segel and Julie Andrews are very good, but the story and script are just not complex nor mature enough. This may seem harsh given that this is a kids’ film, but many great movies for children have worked around this and managed to entertain both adults and children equally. However, there are a quite a lot of chuckles with some genuinely laugh out loud moments. The 3D was also used exceptionally well; in fact, it might be the best use of 3D I have ever seen (apologies to James Cameron), but even with all this, the whole production feels very middle ground. There is no new way of looking at the genre, the story or the characters. Perhaps if it was released 10 or so years ago it would have seemed slightly more original and impressive, but unfortunately with all the high caliber animation movie-goers see at the moment, being adequate just isn’t good enough. That is not to say audiences should give this film a miss – it is worth seeing – but don’t expect too much from it. You will leave the cinema smiling, but will forget the film as soon as that smile fades.

What is it about being French that makes something cool? French bread, French Connection, French kissing. The prefix seems to bring with it an air of sophistication and chic (with the notable exception of French and Saunders). Nowhere is this more true than with French film. Consider the sentence ‘she likes to watch films’. The individual described sounds fairly regular, possibly even a bit dull (I like films probably more than the next man but saying it in conversation can solicit eye rolling and assumption that you just loved Tranformers 2). Now just observe the wonders that ‘French’ can do – ‘she likes to watch French films’. Suddenly our mystery woman has become cultured, interesting, probably the sort to write poetry and hang about in smoky rooms listening to jazz. Its frankly unfair.

It’s not that French film never deserved this title; the Nouvelle Vague earned it in the 50’s and 60’s. The experiments with visual style, the jump cuts, the spirit of backyard film making, without it modern cinema would not be what it is in that there would be no Coppola, Scorsese or Tarantino (who dedicated Reservoir Dogs to director of À bout de soufflé, Jean-Luc Godard – I know… wikipedia can surprise us all). For a while French film was at the cutting edge.

But that time has passed. French film now is nothing to get excited about. Ok that might be a bit far; Amelie was good, so was La Haine, but they weren’t really ground breaking, nor typical of the quality of the vast bulk of French films produced. The big French release you may have heard of this summer was Heartbreaker. It was lazy, predictable and clunky, yet the plot (not startlingly dissimilar to the also terrible 2001 film Heartbreakers with Jennifer Love-Hewitt and Sigourney Weaver) was heralded by the Telegraph as recalling ‘a time in film history when rom-coms were amusing and glamorous as well as romantic’. Time Out London called it ‘instantly amusing’ and ‘hilarious’. I began to think that it might just be me until I saw the faces of the other people leaving the cinema. The smiles were fixed, the comments forced. Everyone was looking nervously at their friends, worried about being the one who didn’t get it. In my case I looked across at my friends. Did they all think that it was god’s gift to cinema?

‘What was that s***?!’

The spell was broken. Nobody had enjoyed it.

It’s not that French film can’t be good, it obviously can. But just the fact that it’s French shouldn’t afford it an air of brilliance.

God and Gold make a story. And to tell it, The Royal Hunt of the Sun will use so much fabric that it could span twice the length of an Olympic sized swimming pool! Twice. That’s right, enough to drown in. When you read the production notes on the sheer amount of gold glint used to embellish the stage and the 10 months it has taken to make all the intricate head-gear and artefacts, well it is very impressive. We will see the Oxford Playhouse being illuminated by Inca bracelets, bangles, anklets, necklaces, and all numbers of exotic priceless stage dressings. But there’s a nagging feeling that creeps up inside.

Could this entire visual spectacle be an elaborate distraction from the actual acting? It’s hard to tell because there is still so much time left for improvement before the show opens in 3rd week. Peter Shaffer’s play is a romanticised re-telling of the 16th century Spanish expedition led against the Inca civilisation. This play is intended to be grand, with an epic musical score and stylised dialogue to capture the audience’s imagination. Unfortunately, the acting seemed to fall short of the hype aroused by its production team – not across the entire cast– but in the two main characters of Francisco Pizarro and the King of the Incas Atahuallpa.

The problem may have been the high level of intensity that Jacob Taee’s Pizarro had to maintain throughout the play. When this somewhat larger-than-life character is being wracked with doubt about his Christian faith, the acting came off as petulant ranting. When Pizarro was being heroic striving to defend his new friend, the King of the Incas, there was an absence of playable emotion and instead, quite a lot of shouting. When the King of the Incas himself, played by Joe Robertson, clapped together his palms and spoke with the tongue of a god, the effect was disappointing, lacking the regal flourish and confidence required to make such a moment work. Not a flop but altogether unpersuasive, these great men weren’t as we wanted them to be, and if there was any humour or affection between them then it was drowned out by the hum of pan-pipes, the fluttering of fabric and the gleam of the gold leaf.

What held the principal players together in this large cast of over 20 actors, were the Cassie Barraclough and Marcel Miller’s Incan generals. With towering stilts that allowed them to bound across the stage and thundering voices, they pierce through gabble of quarrelling Spanish ministers and make their onstage presence mysterious and powerful. And Alfie Enoch’s De Soto was able to bring the impassioned speech and valour that playing a Spanish conquistador demands. The other Spanish soldiers kept the pace exciting, whilst the omnipotent narration given by Jonathan Webb (playing his older-self long after the expedition had taken place) is a good dramatic device that keeps the audience engaged with the nicely choreographed scenes taking place on stage.

The play is definitely unique and an ambitious task for a student budget. If this potentially strong cast can through the teething problems of making somewhat two-dimensional characters come to life in a satisfying way, then this production of Royal Hunt promises to be astounding and mesmerising.