Over the weekend I acted in one of a series of 24 Hour Plays written in response to the election and staged at the New Players Theatre under Charing Cross. Catching up with friends from the different casts, I was reminded how well a lot of the people I did plays with at Oxford are doing. Everyone who directed me at Oxford, for example, is directing professionally, apart from the ones who are still students and intend to go into the theatre when they finish here. A lot of the people who produced the plays I was in have gone into the theatre as well.

When it comes to actors, three recent graduates were involved in Election Night Theatre, three of the actors in the Finalists’ Showcase I was in are at Oxford School of Drama, and another is at Guildhall. As has been the case for many years, a lot of the theatrically minded people from my year group have carried on making plays in the professional theatre. It could be said that this is all the more impressive because Oxford students aren’t taught anything about drama here – but I think that’s one reason why so many of my year group are doing so well. I think it’s the best thing about Oxford drama, and I think it’s something that should be on people’s minds when they consider the kind of plays they want to do here.

Oxford drama works as a free market. At a lot of universities that offer drama courses, theatre is partly segregated. Students doing drama courses produce plays for which other students can’t even audition, so collaboration is capped and controlled by a course whose teachers will also tell you what’s good and wha’ts not. This means that often the standard is higher than some Oxford shows, but the conditions in which students make plays are never going to be as free as they are in Oxford, and the opportunities to learn from your mistakes aren’t as extensive.

Here, we can do whatever we want, with whomever we want. We are free to make any mistakes we like. I think it’s no surprise that a lot of the people given this opportunity go on to do well. Because while students don’t necessarily get any better technically at Oxford, or benefit from training or assistance after they leave, while they’re here they have three years to let their imaginations run wild in a theatre system that does everything it can to safeguard them from personal loss. They can try anything, free from great money worries or too much creative control.

What students can do here is pursue their passions and tastes to extremes. They can do risky things that commercial theatres wouldn’t produce, and prove that their ideas do, in fact, work. Or that they don’t. That’s good too. Better to find out now than on a London stage on press night. As bid deadlines approach for most of Oxford’s theatres, I’d encourage students to think about what they could do here that they might never be able to do again. It’s the risky, mad plays that make Oxford drama uniquely interesting.

Barney Norris is Oxford University Drama Officer

Can community newsletters constitute social realism? Inspired by Rose Hill Roundabout, one such publication produced in South Oxford during the 1950s and ‘60s, Maria Pask’s Déjà Vu was developed in collaboration with the area’s present-day inhabitants.

The resulting film has similar features to its subject matter, being at once trivial, long-winded, celebratory, and admonitory. Over seventy-odd minutes, its scenes of varying length present a predictable array of situations – tea-dances, allotments, discussion clubs, bingo games – inhabited by the same five actors and interspersed occasionally with more elusive offerings.

All this is simply and competently put together. It’s also surprisingly watchable: the plain yet colourful visual style, coupled with the improvisatory feeling of the piece, stop all but the most directionless scenes from properly dragging.

Yet overall Pask seems unsure of how best to use the peculiar nature of her source material. Using the same five actors throughout creates particular problems: the actors clearly play different characters in different scenes, and yet have more in common with each other than with the real-life locals whom they superficially interact with. This seems somewhat problematic.
Perhaps a greater difficulty is that the original newsletters (on display in the gallery) are at least vaguely politically and socially conscious, yet none of this finds its way into the film in any satisfying sense. The only way Pask seems able to move beyond the almost mythically parochial atmosphere she constructs is by being deliberately artificial.

The resulting juxtapositions can be quite humorous – an ‘old woman’ (actually one of the actors in drag) namechecks bitterly ‘what the sociologists call “individualization”‘ while railing against the breakdown of family values – yet it’s clear these aren’t supposed to be taken seriously, except perhaps as manifestations of Pask’s own problems in trying to reconstruct history.
It’s possible that Pask is aiming to play up an inherently idealized, artificial view of community in order to show its limitations. But focusing only on the parts of the subject which substantiate this view seems disingenuous, given both Déjà Vu’s original inspiration and also the collaboration it involved. The result is that it falls between two stools.

Upstairs, Johanna Billing’s I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm presents a series of mostly quiet, elliptical and sensitively shot films, often meditating on situations in which the individual is complicit yet constrained by unknown forces.

Success varies – the diving-board dilemma of Where She Is At is let down by lacklustre execution, while the intriguing visuals of Missing Out and the title piece lack substance.

Yet Magic World, by intercutting a rehearsing group of singing Croatian children with shots of Zagreb suburbia, conveys well an implicit sense of the neutral receptiveness peculiar to childhood.

Even more effective is Magic and Loss: as a group of people pack up an apartment, their repetitive actions leave the mind free to ponder the significance of each object handled while building to an understated, cathartic conclusion.

Interestingly, several films have ends which run directly into their beginnings, often making it impossible to distinguish the two. Given the quietness of several of the films, allowing them to run concurrently within sight, the effect given is of truly dynamic ‘moving pictures’.

Paris Penman-Davies
History, Pembroke

Ardent revolutionary looking for nation on brink of civil war, must have nice legs.

The fact that the Cherwell photographer who had been sent to meet us asked us to ‘talk naturally’ despite us having only just met significantly upped the awkward factor, but having received the most basic instruction on punting from a man in a camouflage jacket using a pen and a phone, and with both of us wearing heels, what possibly could go wrong? Conversation was easy, apart from a few gentle crashes, a moment where Emma’s face decided to manually abort any attempt to look cool when faced with a rather persistent fly, and a moment of my own in which I carefully allowed a tree branch to whack me in the face, just so Emma wouldn’t feel left out. Despite her efforts to drop the pole we did eventually make it back, not before she had questioned my assertion that the only reason people go on Cherwell blind dates is because they think they are going to have sex. All in all a memorable day, especially once we had established that we were both better suited to the 18th century.

Chat: Sublime wit and charm
Looks: Julia Moses
Personality: Aggressively sexual
2nd date? Waiting on clinic results

Emma Roker
Law, Christ Church

Easily impressed pushover with low standards and bad taste.

Turning up on location at the Cherwell Boathouse ten minutes early, I scanned for signs of a blind-date only to be greeted by a somewhat despondent looking male enjoying afternoon tea for one. So when the lovely photographer turned up and it became apparent that Mr. Miserable was my date, I’d surely be forgiven for regarding the prospect of a two-hour punt with some dread. It was a pleasant surprise, and, quite frankly, a relief, therefore, after somehow managing to set off on our punt, to find that not only was Paris rather proficient with a pole but also a reasonably upbeat, engaging character. Mishaps were inevitable of course; I got bitten by a duck, had an insect collide with my eye and failed in my attempt to punt back – thank goodness he managed to fling a branch into his own face and restore the humiliation status quo. On balance, conversation was interesting (if odd at times), he did all the work and nobody fell overboard; so contrary to initial expectations I felt that the afternoon had proved to be a success.

Chat: Entertaining
Looks: Sunshine would do him good
Personality: Perfectly likeable
2nd date? Could be worse things

Naomi Alderman’s The Lessons is a dull book about dull people. It tells the story of a group of Oxford undergraduates who fall under the spell of the ‘mercurial’ Mark, have fun, drink too much champagne, leave university and find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the big wide world and the shocking events which pervade it. Or so says the blurb.

In fact, Mark himself never gives much evidence of his oft-discussed charm. He is fractious and pretentious, and his alleged charisma is only found in the allegations of it: Alderman seems to think that by repeatedly describing him as ‘charming’ she can get away with providing absolutely no basis for it. The group of students whom he invites to live with him in his huge, romantic house are equally falsely lauded.

James, the narrator, is a below-average middle-class physicist who is supposedly ‘beautiful’ but whose conversation and observations are so pedestrian as to render entire episodes in the novel obsolete. The best description of him comes from cruel Mark, who tells James ‘All you ever are is a reflection of other people… What are you really? Nothing. You’re all shadows and mirrors.’

The others in the group – highly intelligent Franny, boorish Simon, musical Jess, beautiful Emmanuella – are at best characterised by their interests rather than their personalities, and at worst not characterised at all.

All we really learn about Emmanuella, for example, is that she is rich and that she fancies tall blond men.

Wealth is the other problem in the book. In order to bring all the characters together, Alderman has to pretend that Mark is not a snob; yet this seems so unlikely as to be almost impossible. The main force for social hierarchy comes from Mark’s mother, who disapproves of the group because they are not Catholic.

But this does not ring true at all: with his millions of pounds, vast estates dotted around the world and giddyingly grand contacts, Mark is significantly posher than all the other characters, yet this does not come into play at all in any of the relationship dynamics except for one rather feeble effort by Alderman to suggest that James is in Mark’s debt.

Alderman gives the impression of being slightly in love with her characters: the golden hue which colours their past seems to be not their nostalgia but hers.
There are many dreary passages about staying up until dawn drinking, or giving New Year’s eve parties, but the most naughty thing that ever happens at these events is one episode of marijuana-induced tipsiness. Compared to Gossip Girl or Cruel Intentions, these parties are positively tame.

The Lessons is extremely derivative. It draws on Brideshead Revisited, The Secret History, and The Line of Beauty to create a novel which is a hotchpotch of the worst aspects of each.

The narrative is pacy, and there are some funny moments, but at every stage Alderman lets slip a detail which suspends our suspended disbelief and exposes a flaw in the basic plot. The novel, like its narrator, is composed merely of shadows and mirrors, always failing to materialise into anything resembling a believable, gripping story.