An Ideal Hustband in rehearsal in Magdalen Gardens

The summer sun peeks bravely from behind a cloud; warmth spreads, slow and lazy over the quads and gardens; undergraduates awake. Just imagine it hasn’t been raining. Just imagine we’re back in the heady days of third week. Just imagine.

Summer brings garden shows as surely as it brings exams. Whether you’re coughing up lung- fulls of library dust or blinking awake from an afternoon nap, Cherwell under your head, drama in the sun is the perfect way to spin out a langorous evening.

There are few things more quintessentially Oxfordian, and most of them (Pimm’s and picnics, if not punting) can be combined with a good play. And a healthy dose of a production such as The Tempest does more than give you an opportunity to avoid reading or scraping together a last- minute essay.

This is a guilt-free escape. This is art. You’re growing as a person. You’re getting cultural.

And we all know that Trinity must be savoured. There is no better way of drinking in the unique flavour of an Oxford summer than at a garden play. There’s no better way of drinking in the unique flavour of a G&T than at a garden play.

Garden plays are an inherently social event. we go there to hang out with friends, to show our new significant other just how culturally aware we are, to see and be seen.

Clare Bucknell, who produced this year’s Magdalen Garden Show, putting on a truly excellent production or Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, has a warning or two, however.

‘The English summer is utterly unsuited to garden plays, insofar as it is always unpredictable and usually dreadful’, she points out. We seem to be snapped back into reality, wrenched from reverie by the ominous rumble of thunder.

But the very sense of danger can be a benefit. Bucknell claims ‘drama is a risky business, and so is the English summer. The combination of the two begins as a serious undertaking, and ends as a thrilling gamble.’

The very lack of predictability makes for some quite spectacular productions, made more spectacular still because everybody involved recognises that the endeavour is balanced on the whim of fate.

If the weather can not only detract, but even add to the aura of an Oxford garden, surely the splendid setting is no such poison chalice. ‘An audience ought to feel displaced from the run of its usual experience, and old buildings help to achieve that suspension of disbelief’, Bucknell confirms.

Magdalen’s uniquely beautiful surroundings contributed magnificently to An Ideal Husband’s success. But Bucknell adds, with a smile, ‘That said, contemporary theatre would be an entirely different story; and I have personally learnt that a college whose unfeasibly loud bells ring out every fifteen minutes may be more of a distraction than a setting.’

Oh well. You take the good with the bad.

Krishna Omkar is directing the Merton Garden Show. Another Wilde play, this time The Importance of Being Earnest, Omkar believes that garden shows ‘not only brings out the most creative and inventiveside of student drama but also serves as a base to gain experience that is not available elsewhere at a University level.’

He is aware of the problems inherent, ‘there are certainly some theatrical effects that need the enclosed space of a theatre’, but feels this is balanced by the fact that ‘it adds a new dimension to the performance that we wouldn’t get on the OFS or playhouse stage.’

Garden plays are plagued with difficulties and doubts, more so even than normal productions; but the danger and the drama is all part of their appeal.

The uniqueness of the setting makes for a truly unforgetable experience, even if the plays are those which will always be produced, which you will see again and again. Sunglasses, sun-cream, and sunshine. Go for it.

All
Tomorrow’s Parties – ATP to its friends – is unlike
other festivals. Firstly, it’s held in Butlins, Minehead. The
benefits are obvious: showers, beds, kettles, even a TV, as well as
the culinary delights of Pizza Hut and Burger King and some pretty
perturbed-looking Redcoats.

The
other notable feature of this festival is that you won’t find
Panic! At the Disco headlining here. ATP is a haven for obscure
indie, post-rock, electronica and the odd foray into hip-hop –
basically, the kind of thing you have to be a fairly serious music
fan to pay for a whole weekend of.

A
chosen band or artist selects each festival’s line-up. Past
‘curators’ include Mogwai, The Mars Volta and Tortoise.
This time the mantle falls, surprisingly given their stature in
comparison with such legends, to Texan post-rockers Explosions In The
Sky.

The
first highlight comes on Friday evening, as Tokyo’s Mono
craft a deep, brooding, relentless wall of sound. Epic,
guitar-heavy, vocal-less noise creates an overriding mood of beauty
juxtaposed with darkness. A great start to the weekend.

Disappointingly,
the same can’t be said for Explosions In The Sky
themselves. There’s a weird atmosphere around the main stage: a
huge perma-tent and vomit-inducing carpet just aren’t conducive
to losing oneself in the music. Also, the PA really isn’t loud
enough. Not much is gained from this set that you can’t get
from listening to Explosions on CD fairly loud – and that can
be done in much nicer surroundings.

Later that night
Four Tet tries to make the indie kids dance, failing miserably for the most part.
Classics like ‘Hands’ and ‘Glue of the World’
are beefed up, extended and mixed in with newer, clubbier material.
Pauses between tracks are confusing, as if this show can’t
really decide whether it’s a gig or a DJ set, but altogether
it’s good fun: shame the crowd doesn’t seem to ‘get’
it.

What was a minor quibble for Four Tet becomes a major problem for Saul
Williams, who comments repeatedly on the awkward shuffling of the
(overwhelmingly scruffy, male, twentysomething) audience in response
to his staccato hip-hop and diatribes on race as social construct.

The
crowd is back on more familiar ground for long-established art
rockers …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead.
Their set is joyous, the scuzzy complexities of their sound
translating well to a PA modified with extra amps so that, for the
first time this weekend, we leave with an agreeable ringing in our
ears.

Atlas
Sound also deserve honourable mention. Delicate, deadpan male and
female vocals recall Sonic Youth, as distorted guitars over a
background of pulsating, reverb-heavy looped samples create a
distinctive and impressive sound. Next up are Animal
Collective, offering something largely unrecognisable from either of their two most recent records. This is no bad
thing: the band’s live sound is heavy, intricately layered and
interesting.

Broken
Social Scene, meanwhile, bring the festivities to a triumphant
close. Inviting an ‘ATP orgy’ of J Mascis and member of
Explosions and the Constantines on stage, the band confidently
perform brass-laced versions of favourites like ‘Ibi dreams of
Pavement’ and ‘Shoreline 7/4’ alongside new
material.

And so it’s with smiles on our faces that we brave the M5 to be back in time for Monday morning tutorials. A wet weekend in Butlins has never seemed so cool.

It is not a set
designer’s favourite play, the one with nineteen scenes in nineteen different
locations, but at least Spring Awakening does it with a sense
of irony.

For once you reach that nineteenth scene, and you think you have
encountered the worst of the stage directions, you are hit with the fruitiest
and most ludicrous of them all: Moritz Stiefel, with his
head under his arm, comes stamping across the graves.

I suppose that is
just one of many reasons why Spring Awakening is rarely
tackled either in professional or amateur theatre. With a cast of 37 characters
it is something of a behemoth of a play.

And then there is the content: teenage
rape, abortion and suicide. If that has semi-raised an internal eyebrow
somewhere on your mother’s side, it is quite astonishing to think the play was
written well over a hundred years ago.

Back in the 1890s,
they did not have the technology available to us now to bring the different
scenes to life. Our current idea for creating these different locations is
to leave the stage as a blank canvas, and suggest the different spaces with
careful lighting and suggestive pieces of flown physical set.

Without the need
to lug hulking great flats on and off, we hope the scene changes will be much
more fluid and add an ethereal quality to the vivid world these children
inhabit.

As for poor Moritz
and his disembodied head, that is very much a work in progress. As a Member of
the Magic Circle, I had tried to design an illusion that would enable us to
have a truly decapitated boy, carrying his talking head under his arm. But for
that detail, we would have had to sacrifice the stomping across the graves.

It
looks like we will end up resorting to old fashioned methods after all: the
willing suspension of disbelief. Something I have learnt from this project is
that it is all too easy to let technology get in the way and all that really
counts is the relationships between characters, the essence of our theatre.

We are still a way
off achieving all that and for the next three weeks, this is where our
attention lies. Between now and opening night, let us hope there are not too
many times when we would all sooner exit pursued by a bear.