Blues Article Corrections
Cherwell would like to apologise for printing a number of inaccuracies in last week’s article by Matthew Evans-Young in our feature entitled ‘True Blues or Mercenaries’. We would like to clarify that:
1. Joe Roff applied to read PPE at Harris Manchester College. His application resulted in him being interviewed at the college and he was subsequently offered a place.
2. Anton Oliver applied to do an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management, and was subsequently interviewed at the Oxford University Department for the Environment. He was then offered a place on the course. We have been informed that has been asked to consider converting to an MPhil before the end of this academic year.
3. In the article we did not intend to suggest that non-matriculated people can play for OURFC. To play for Oxford in the Varsity rugby match you have to be a matriculated student studying at Oxford University. All graduate students who play for Oxford University RFC have applied, been interviewed and then been offered a place to read a degree at Oxford University.
4. We also have been advised that Sean Fitzpatrick, and not Anton Oliver, is the most capped All Black hooker ever.
First Night Review: Accidental Death of an Anarchist
Given the difficulties of maintaining the relevance and interest of Accidental Death of an Anarchist in twenty-first century Oxford, the opening night of this student adaptation at the Burton Taylor managed to inject a good deal of life into the translated version. Bear in mind, however, that as Dario Fo himself commented, the play is most rewarding for Italians who experienced the actual events that took place, or those who have enough of an understanding of its cultural and historical context to be absorbed into its notorious satire. It may still be enjoyed without particular knowledge of the play’s background, but if one has no interest in political satire as an art form, then it may be best to steer clear.
Despite the translated version’s attempts to relate to an English audience, the remoteness of context may make it difficult for the viewer to remain engaged with the narrative of the piece. The complexities of the script make it an extremely dialogue heavy affair, and as a result, much of the first half of the play can be quite laborious to engage with. Indeed, in the first half the cast are sometimes guilty of rushing their lines without investing suitable tone and emotion to coax the audience along.
Some of the most engaging moments in the play are drawn from the energy of ‘The Maniac’, played to great effect by Jonny Rhodes. This energy seemed to overwhelm him at moments in the first half of the play, with the occasional slip from role due to rapid line delivery. Certainly in the second half, however, he had relaxed into a suitable tempo and helped create some truly engaging moments, most notably in his cunning manipulation of Inspector Pissani (Lewis Goodall) and the Superintendent (Max Millard). These two developed well as a pair, likewise relaxing during the second half of the play and hamming themselves up as suitable victims for the maniac’s subtle jibes and attacks.
Perhaps the pace of the play may seem slightly imbalanced between the two halves, with the plethora of physical moments in the second half sometimes threatening to plunge it into confusion. It was a shame that the moment where the characters deliberately fall out of role to articulate political points was swallowed slightly in the visual action; Moments like this have the potential, unfortunately not adequately realised, for the play to engage the cynicism of a modern audience. The addition of Lizzie Davidson as Feletti the journalist, though, did help to check the exuberant physicality, with her precise and considered delivery complimenting the role and the play well.
Given the density of dialogue in the play, it is a credit to the actors that they managed to sustain the energy of the performance during its one and a half hour running time. If you’re willing to forgive a few weak moments and character slips, and commit to engaging in the relentless satire of Dario Fo, then this show will provide you with some memorable moments, particularly from the literally maniacal lead role.
Musical Interlude: Stornoway
Catch Stornoway headlining at the Carling Academy on Saturday 8th November from 7pm. Tickets £6.
In a band? Think you’re good enough to be guests on Cherwell’s Musical Interlude programme? Then send us some clips of your music to podcasts[at]cherwell.org…
Review: Kung fu panda
This week’s top pick to buy or rent is Kung Fu Panda, the animated film about being true to yourself and reaching your full potential. Well, actually, that probably describes every animated film I’ve ever seen, but this genuinely fun movie achieves the perfect mix of quips, action and, of course, loveable and colourful animals.
Po the panda is fed up of his mundane life serving dumplings from his father’s restaurant. His father, by the way, is a duck, a biological impossibility which only highlights his alienation from his own culture.
However, when he is inadvertently selected as ‘The Chosen One’ he must be trained by kung fu prodigies ‘The Furious Five’ to defeat rogue snow leopard Tai Lung. Cue some workout montages, some great fight sequences and Dustin Hoffman as adorable yet deadly master Shifu.
This is a really fun film, but it’s just a little too short, and while the animation is impressive it doesn’t quite match Pixar, although this is certainly Dreamworks’ best attempt in years. The actors behind the animals, meanwhile, are enthusiastic, but most are wasted; Lucy Liu, Jackie Chan and Seth Rogen have about three lines, and are hardly worth the surely vast sum earned from their participation.
With a fun plot, great animation and a sequel already greenlit, Kung Fu Panda is a good way to give your inner child a treat.
Four stars
Outrage over naked KY jelly wrestling at Kukui
A student club night featuring naked wrestling in KY jelly, topless girls and a ‘fetish snake show’ has sparked an investigation by police this week.
The probe into a potential breach of licence was launched after revellers visiting the Kukui nightclub on Wednesday October 29 were astonished to find that a virtual sex show had been laid on as entertainment.
The event, organised just days before the start of Oxford
University Student Union’s Gender Equality Week, had been billed as “one of the naughtiest nights of the year,” and has been condemned by students who attended.
One undergraduate described how she entered the venue and found herself surrounded by raunchy performers.
“There were girls covered in jelly and wrestling with each other,” she said.
“They were only wearing small t-shirts, which they then ripped off and continued as good as naked except for tiny thongs.”
She added that there had also been a topless woman only partially covered by a 12 foot long snake she was carrying, whilst others put on performances of topless fire-eating.
Another shocked student said that she and her friends had been left disgusted by the naked displays.
“There was a group around the girls that seemed to think it was great, but my friends and I were really embarrassed.
“The whole thing just descended into something that was really vile and made a lot of people feel a bit uncomfortable.”
Adverts for the event on Facebook had told partygoers to adopt a “scary” dress code and prepare for “f**ked up Halloween sh*t,” with promises of “KY Jelly Wrestling ‘Naked'” and “Fetish snake shows involving a 12 foot albino python.”
Rachel Cummings, OUSU Vice-President for Women launched a scathing attack on the night and condemned it as hugely inappropriate.
“It’s unacceptable for club organizers to use women in this way,” she said.
“Such acts demean women in a city where they have fought for their rights to be taken seriously as intelligent, autonomous individuals.
“Its accounts like this that prove the need for continuing campaigns on gender equality.”
The spokesperson for Five Star Entz, the Oxford based company which organised the night, declined to comment when asked about this issue.
He did however defend the entertainment as “a kind of Halloween fetish show.”
“It wasn’t all centred around the KY Jelly wrestling, although obviously this is something that we gave a lot of publicity to as it is a big student thing,” he explained.
There have however been efforts to run follow-up wrestling events since the initial night, which was mainly attended by students from Oxford Brookes.
A similar ‘KY Jelly Wrestling Election Special’ night, run in conjunction with club promoter Balreick Srai, was cancelled on Tuesday at the last minute.
The Rock Entz head said, “We cancelled the wrestling because we didn’t want the negative publicity.
“This is a new club and we don’t want this to be the first thing written it. It’s not the image we want to present.”
As accounts of the event filtered through there were additional concerns that organisers may have potentially violated licensing laws regarding in-club entertainment.
A spokesperson for the Licensing Authority of Oxford City Council confirmed that an investigation into the legality of the performances had been conducted in conjunction with officers from Thames Valley Police.
He said however that officials were now satisfied that no crime had been committed.
“As the law stands at the moment there is nothing to stop them extending their current license for dancing and putting on pole-dancers and the like.
Plagiarism will be punished, warns Oxford
Oxford University has warned student plagiarisers that they will be caught, after a survey revealed almost half of Cambridge students admitted to copying work.
Approximately 49% of Cambridge University students confessed to cheating, in a survey published by the Varsity student newspaper. Law students were exposed as being the worst offenders, with 62% of them breaking the University’s plagiarism rules.
The revelations have triggered the introduction of new special detection software at the institution, after only 5% of students participating in the survey admitted having been caught cheating.
Anti-plagiarism technology
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Oxford University confessed that similar examples of cheating were certainly happening at their own institution.
She said that, “Whilst we would be surprised if Oxford was not near the bottom of national and world rankings for the incidence of plagiarism, thanks to the measure of care taken with both teaching and examining at Oxford, we are not complacent.
“Students sometimes do not fully understand what constitutes plagiarism. We take educating them about these issues extremely seriously.”
She added that Oxford University already has anti-plagiarism technology in place to investigate cheating in examinations and also monitors online sources where students can find material, such as essay banks.
If a student cheats on a piece of written work, they may lose marks or score zero on the assignment. In more serious cases, students may find themselves sent down.
Oxford University have the power to take away degrees that have already been awarded if it is revealed that the student cheated. However, despite these prospective penalties, several Oxford students admitted to having frequently cheated during their studies.
“Just a fact of life”
One second year student said, “I’m not sure what counts as plagiarism, but taking material from other sources and using it in your own work is just a fact of life.
“It’s just what goes on, especially when your back’s against the wall during an essay crisis. I’ve heard of people copying entire tracts of text off the internet; anyone who thinks it doesn’t go on is kidding themselves.”
Another anonymous student said, “If I thought I could get away with it, I would do it all the time but it’s just not worth the hassle of getting caught.”
Paul Dwyer, OUSU Access and Academic Affairs Officer, agrees that “there may be occasions when someone simply does not cite their sources correctly and finds themselves in trouble.”
He also recognised the high pressure environment at Oxford could lead students to plagiarism, saying that in some cases students “might feel that it is better to submit something that contains plagiarised passages, rather than submit nothing at all.”
However, Dwyer concluded that the chances of students who plagairise not getting caught by the authorities is “very slim”.
Graduate careers market hit by crunch
Students graduating in 2009 face unprecedented levels of debt and will struggle to find employment in the contracting economy.
The introduction of top-up fees in 2006 along with the rising cost of living will mean that this year’s finalists will graduate with the highest level of student debt ever seen in the UK.
According to a survey conducted by the independent university guide Push.co.uk in August 2008, Oxford students will graduate with an average debt of £12,311.
On top of this, the Student Loan Company doubled its interest rate to 4.8% earlier this year, bringing it to its highest level since 1991.
Loan repayments are collected as a percentage of post-graduation salaries over £15,000, meaning that finding a well-paid job straight from university is absolutely essential for many students.
However, the global economic downturn of the past few months has meant that the graduate job market is contracting. Companies are being forced to merge in order to bring down their fixed costs, and as a result fewer graduate positions are on offer.
Trinity Mirror plc, which publishes the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror as well as over 150 regional newspapers, announced earlier this year that it had cancelled its graduate scheme, and that recruitment would not recommence for the foreseeable future.
The financial world has seen the biggest reductions in graduate positions.
A recent survey by the Income Data Services suggested that financial firms are expected to employ 14.7% fewer graduates this year.
Growth in the graduate job market as a whole is expected to fall sharply compared to this time last year, with many companies explicitly citing the credit crunch as the cause of this reduction.
We spoke to an employee who recently joined Lehman Brothers. She explained the state of affairs within the industry and added that like in all previous recessions, graduate recruitment across the financial sector is going to shrink.
However, companies will always aim to avoid rescinding graduate offers because of the negative message this sends to campuses.
She explained that banks and financial institiutions have made redundancies at every level over the last few months and there may be more to come.
She continued, “Banks don’t want to lose juniors as they are the future of the company, but sometimes it’s the only way to cut costs.”
Chris Stainton, an Oxford graduate who set up UniVentures, a recruitment consultancy and marketing agency in April 2007, echoed this, saying, “the banking job market has clearly tightened.
“Graduate recruiters always respond to business need – the message on worsening market conditions has certainly filtered through, and as a result, banks are focused on recruiting interns rather than full time analysts.”
Mergers have affected a large number of financial organisations in the past couple of months, and fewer graduate positions will be offered in the sector as a result.
However, our interviewee maintained that prospective candidates shouldn’t be discouraged.
She said, “It’s actually a not a bad time to start out in banking. Because of all the redundancies higher up, graduates starting next year are likely to be given more responsibility than they might have otherwise had.
“It will be more competitive, but if you’re really interested in the job this is a fascinating time to be in the sector. Recession is like a rite of passage for a banker.”
Beating the Crunch in 2009
While competition is necessarily going to be much fiercer for this year’s graduate intake, there are steps that Oxford students can take to improve their chances. For those wanting to get into finance, our interviewee’s recommendation is to be willing to move out of Europe.
“Many banks and private equity funds are still hiring in Dubai and Asia, so being willing to move there for a few years will probably help your application.”
Moving to Dubai has other advantages – the tax burden is much less and living costs are significantly lower than in the UK.
Jonathan Black, Director of the Oxford Careers Service, commented that “in this situation there is no space for students to be complacent – but then there never really was.” He went to say that “While certain things are outside our control, employers are going to be interested in how you deal with bad situations.”
He urged students not to be discouraged or anxious about the current graduate job market, and to approach their applications with confidence.
“Focus on fewer applications, but really concentrate on them. In general, students need to take more care over this process – a leading recruiter told me just the other day that they have to reject 25% of applications purely because of stupid mistakes.”
With fewer vacancies available, the importance of networking has never been greater.
Jonathan advocates a concerted campaign of what he terms ‘information interviewing’ – a process of sending out letters and emails asking for further information on the sector to key individuals that can often result in a positive outcome. “People never believe me, but it really does work. Extra efforts to be courteous like handwritten thank-you letters can make all the difference.”
The Careers Service will be launching a new website later in the term which will allow students to post their CVs online and match them up with recruiters’ profiles. In such an uncertain and difficult time, every increment can make a difference.
• Be prepared to move out of Europe. Lehman’s didn’t fire anyone in the Dubai office so be willing to move out to the Middle East
• Don’t be discouraged, employers will be interested in how you deal with bad situations
• Approach applications with confidence
• Focus on fewer applications, but really concentrate on them. In general, students need to concentrate more over this process
Liebelei
This compelling performance of Arthur Schnitzler’s Liebelei combines ill-fated romance with engaging dialogue and convincing characterisation. In the aftermath of a tangled love affair, Fritz is consoled by the wisdom of his friend Theodore as the two discuss what purpose a woman can and should serve to a man. Theodore (Jacob Zwaan) is a commanding presence on the stage and his witty ranting prose provides an entertaining foil to the more introspective and tightly wound Fritz.
Fritz, having recently ended an affair with a married woman, is left struggling to banish both the memory of his lover and the paranoia that ensues from fear of her husband finding out. The situation is complicated further as Fritz is also embarking on a new romance with Christine (Frances Rose), the embodiment of sweet, naive, young love.
Tension looms throughout the play, with Max Hoehn’s portrayal of Fritz conveying an intricate weave of anxious preoccupation and genuine tenderness in his scenes with Christine. ‘Sweet’ Christine and the savvier Mizi (Isabelle Drury) serve as strong counterparts, but they also work to offset the dynamics of Theodore and Fritz’s relationship. This is further echoed by effective blocking and nuanced consideration of delivery of lines. Perceptible shifts in atmosphere are delicately delivered with every entrance and exit, demonstrating the convincing and intriguing relationships on stage, and essentially making this play a worthwhile watch.
5th Week. Tuesday – Saturday
BT Early Slot
4 Stars
Oxford spend £500m on Radcliffe campus site
Oxford University plans to spend half a billion pounds on a radical new plan to create a campus on the site of the old Radcliffe Infirmary.
Described as its most ambitious project in recent history, the design is set to be one of the biggest investments in the history of the University, with the site alone costing £45 million.
The University scrapped earlier plans to build a “sweeping boulevard” from the site to the University Press building, as this was deemed against the character of central Oxford. The Woodstock road site has been reduced to rubble in preparation for development by next spring. The first buildings expect to open in late 2011.
The new campus represents a major departure from the current collegiate system. The University is keen to stress that the plans are meant to complement college facilities “both academically and architecturally,” but that the development represents the most radical attempt to create a general campus “since Thomas Bodley designed his famous library in 1602.”
“Crucial for the future”
According to Luke Purser, the humanities head of development, it will include a large Mathematics institute, along with several buildings devoted to the humanities and two underground libraries.
The plans will be reviewed by the strategic development committee of the council this November. They form the first stage in Oxford’s plan for renovation. A University spokesperson said, “This is an exciting development which will be crucial for the University’s future.”
He added that the proposals have considered local opinion, “after extensive public consultation, the reaction from people has been generally supportive.”
It forms the first result of an appeal for funds to regenerate Oxford’s facilities that was announced earlier this year.