Anya Reiss, shuffling papers and fiddling with her hair onstage, doesn’t seem to match up with herself on paper. At 17, she became the youngest playwright to have her play accepted at the Royal Court Theatre, where it was staged this summer to great critical acclaim. Spur of the Moment focuses on 12-year-old Delilah whose parents are too busy screaming at each other to notice their daughter kissing the 21-year-old lodger. The play received nearly unconditional praise from some of the country’s top papers for its candid look at family life and social taboos.

As soon as Reiss starts to deliver the Corpus Christi College Drama Society lecture, all her awkwardness disappears. She’s very comfortable talking about the play, lucidly describing the experience of letting go of the script, realising the auditioning process wouldn’t be like X-Factor. She draws us her listeners with behind-the-scenes anecdotes that have everyone chuckling.

The play began on one of the Royal Court’s young writers’ programmes, and Reiss wrote it while studying for her A-levels. She thinks this helped, as she didn’t feel any pressure to ‘get it right’ or hampered by any solid conception of ‘what a playwright was’. Now the first play is over, and critics are waiting to see what the ‘new voice of a generation’ will do next; is she feeling the pressure of being a one-hit wonder?

‘I do, but I don’t and I can’t let it affect what I do’. Throughout, Reiss places emphasis on the importance of freedom to what she does; ‘there’s a big danger to overcomplicate writing too much; it is just basically knowing what people say next’. Later, when I ask if seeing her first play go through the rehearsal process informed the way she wrote her second, she says: ‘I try not to imagine it onstage so much because I think you start limiting yourself.’ In Spur of the Moment the action moves between rooms all over the house, perhaps contributing to the criticism that the play is too much like TV.

One audience member has already confronted Reiss with a jibe about television, saying ‘it’s just a story – it could’ve been a soap opera…where is the real insight?’, to which she responds with unruffled calmness, getting the audience to laugh with her: ‘I do genuinely go to the theatre for a story… I think it’s just different ways of writing…there are TV programmes, plays that really say something and try to change the world and there’re others that just observe it… I think it’s not wrong to just observe it.’

Later I give her another opportunity to respond to critics: ‘the most frustrating part of the whole process was critics putting negative things down to my age,’ she says, ‘when they said it was TV writing or it became farcical at the end or other things they decided that it was a mistake I had made from being young and inexperienced, when actually rightly or wrongly they were choices I had made.’ With characteristic self-assurance, she states: ‘I’d rather be credited with making bad choices than seem like I didn’t know what I had done.’
Reiss is currently on her gap year, although with TV programmes like Skins and Hollyoaks already under her belt and her second script currently in the hands of the Royal Court, it looks like the gap could be a long one. Though I’m not sure Reiss’ voice is the one of our generation, it is distinctive and self-assured, capable of drama, comedy and biting observation; it will be interesting to see what comes next.

A week and a half before showtime, and The Shape of Things is already as slick as a high-class made-for-TV drama. It’s going to be fantastic. That’s all there is to it, really.

The play opens with the art student Evelyn, husky, self-possessed, delicately ironic Evelyn, stepping over a line with a can of spraypaint. Adam, the nervous young security guard, asks her to step back on the right side of the line. She doesn’t. He’s stymied. The conversation has the awkward weirdness of symbolism at this point, and you worry for a moment that you’ve been plunged in medias res into one of Caryl Churchill’s nightmares, but things soon settle into the easy-flowing, dynamic, soap-opera tone that comes to characterise this production.

Evelyn soon twists Adam round her little finger. Before he knows quite what’s happening, she’s sprayed an enormous penis on the priceless statue he was guarding, her phone number on his jacket, and her face all over his dreams. She takes him over, moulding his body, burning his clothes, reshaping his nose, warping his friendship with Phil and Jenny, the play’s only other characters. Twist. Yank. Snip. Then comes the brutal denouement, which transforms all this gentle romantic comedy into stark philosophy.

Sophie King’ Evelyn is the lynchpin of this play, and she pulls off the part with unforgiving intensity. It would have been very easy to play Evelyn with the kind of indie insecurity peddled by Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but King keeps up a nasty, domineering edge throughout an excellent performance. Meanwhile Joe Murphy brings the same gawky charisma to The Shape of Things that he brought to Equus, reminding you forcibly of Scott Pilgrim landed with Ramona Flowers. Their relationship is credible and compelling, helped along by painstaking attention to little details – the motions of their hands, and the minutiae of their expressions.

Cassie Barraclough, making her directorial debut at Oxford, has stripped this drama down to the point where it is hard to fault. Such flaws as it has – the lack of depth in Rob Jones’ Phil, for example, or the slightly forced rhetoric of the debates about the nature and morality of art – lie more with Neil LaBute’s script than with the cast. This is compelling drama, short on sticky rom-com sentimentality and long on menace and realism.

Lift your battered eighth-week body out of its habitual slump in the library and drag it over to the Burton Taylor for a little over an hour – you won’t regret it. The Shape of Things is straight-up, refreshing and powerful liquor.

It is wonderful thing when writing a press preview to immediately feel welcomed into the family of the cast and crew. Co-Director Adam Scott Taylor took me into a JCR which has been transformed into a comfy dorm room and was clearly delighted with how his production has shaped out so far. Students were warming up and laughing in pyjamas, already in the realm of children play-acting and loving every minute of it. I was asked to sit on the floor (bean bags and duvets will be provided for the actual show) and to relax and enjoy the proceedings. Taylor’s partner, Liam Steward-George, sought me out and was equally delightful, and I felt more like I was a young child in boarding school, being looked after by two kindly teachers, than about to review a play. And this is exactly the impression this clever pair had sought to give. Before the play even starts, you know you’re going to like it. And you won’t be disappointed.

Obviously, being performed in a college room, the play is not awash with technical features (Peter Pan is hardly going to be suspended from invisible wire, floating around the audience’s heads). But this is not an issue in this production. Taylor and Steward-George have decided to tell the whole story as if it were a piece of play-acting, a bed-time enactment of a fairy-tale. Thus, university actors are playing seven year old children who are playing forty year old adults. Such an effect looks and feels easy in this show, and that is a testament to the amount of work that must have been put in to the characterisation; it is not an easy technique to master. Highlights include Will Mendelowitz’s Mr Darling/Captain Hook. His interpretation of both roles is every bit convincing as a child impersonating his father or a wicked uncle. Emily Gill too, as Mrs Darling, is able to capture that same childish hyperbolic representation of her elders. On a similar note, I never thought that a twenty-something year old girl with a splotch of face paint writhing about on the floor in a pink onesie could be convincing as a Newfoundland called Nana, but Rosalind Stone’s commitment to the role of the “child-dog” is heart-warming. I almost welled up when the children “ahhhed” as mean Mr Darling played a nasty trick on her by putting yucky medicine in her milk bowl.
As an ensemble, the cast fit together well. Wendy (Eídín Crowdy), Peter (Michael Gale) and Tinkerbell’s (Azmina Siddique) work wonderfully as a trio, particularly in that famous “shadow scene” (a great piece of choreography ensues as Wendy sews Peter to his shadow, played by Zippy Bakowska, and Tink sulks at their imminent bonding). Similarly, the banter between the lost boys and the pirates fits together nicely; the humour is infectious and I spent most of these scenes chuckling happily to myself.

A quick word too on the innovative staging. The directorial pair have managed to make one sofa serve as a bed, a cave, a house and a means of creating an impression of Peter flying (this itself is reason enough to see the play) and have incorporated every inch of the room into the stage-play-world; I kept having to move my feet as overexcited “children” bounded past me in delight.

The songs, for the most part, work well and will give the opportunity for some fun audience interaction but the only point I would make is that Crowdy’s Wendy needs a bit more projection on her solo as she is sometimes drowned out by the chorus.

With a full band, sixty audience members snuggled up together and more fun than you can shake a stick at, there is no reason why anyone should not see this play. Oxford drama so often takes itself too seriously and it’s nice to see that a team separate from the “OUDS pack” can put on something so uplifting and silly, yet still theatrically well considered and constructed. Go. And if you don’t like it, you’re dead inside.

Before arriving at Wadham’s Moser Theatre I knew nothing about the Borderlands fairy tale of Tamlane, a young man captured by the vicious and possessive Faery Queen. Initially sceptical about whether the medium of dance would be the best one through which to learn this dark and romantic story, I was proved wrong by this powerful production.

When he rejects the Queen’s advances, Tamlane is turned into a tree as punishment. Then Margaret (Sarah Thorp) wanders into the forest, they fall in love at first sight and sleep together, until the Faery Queen and discovers them and steals Tamlane back, leaving Margaret alone, bereft and pregnant. Will the lovers be reunited, and will Tamlane ever return to the mortal realm? All will be revealed at the Moser in 7th week.

A ballet with a modern twist, elegant dancing combines with eerie, ethereal music to create a piece which seems to defy genre. Choreographed and composed by students and claiming to be influenced by contemporary, salsa, modern and flamenco, the dancing is traditional in style but is not afraid to surprise, with the incorporation of unexpected moves, such as some sudden gyrating which would not be out of place in the Bridge, producing great effect.

Particular accord must go to Anja Meindhart, who brings out the frightening, seductive and dangerous personality of the Faery Queen with aplomb. We see her manipulate the unwilling Tamlane with glee, pulling him up from the ground with one finger, and his clear discomfort is juxtaposed with her cruel amusement in their very well choreographed dance, which manages to convey itself powerfully as both a fight and a seduction.

The contrast in atmosphere between this scene and Tamlane’s dance with his true love Margaret is tangible. Their joy is infectious, and I felt involved in their romance, such that when the Faery Queen reclaims Tamlane in a fit of jealousy, and we return to the mood of the earlier scene, I felt the injustice, and was able to share the obvious pain of Tamlane and, later, Margaret.

Robert Walport is an excellent Tamlane, with clear facial expressions conveying the mood, helping the story be understood, and some impressive balancing acts and strength.

There is variation in the quality of the Chorus’ dancing, distracting from their potentially effective ensemble scenes, which rely on everyone moving in perfect harmony with each other. However, with a week still to go until performance I am sure that glitches will be ironed out, and the assurance of the principal characters makes up for this.

A problem inherent in story telling through dance is that details get lost in translation, and although I understood the gist, there is danger that the audience may lose interest through simply not knowing what’s going on.

But with programme notes to help out, this should prove conquerable, and the skill and power of the dancing is worth seeing for itself.