About 200 members of the group Pro-Test marched in Oxford on Saturday to declare their support for animal testing for scientific purposes and to demonstrate against “fear and intimidation” from animal rights groups.
Pro-Test is a group founded in January 2006 by sixteen year-old Laurie Pycroft, in support of the building of a new biomedical research facility in South Parks road, which is now nearing completion. The organisation’s three main aims are to “defend the rights of researchers to work in peace”; to “celebrate the successes of animal research in developing treatments for disease”; and to “communicate a better understanding about animal research to non-scientists everywhere”.
The rally began at noon with speeches made twice along Broad Street and then again at the biomedical facility. The Pro-Testers marched along Broad Street chanting, “No more fear, animal research wanted here.”
The rally was a peaceful affair until one man came to the front of the crowd and shouted while Dr Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, was speaking. The shouter was escorted away by the police.
Dr Harris said, “There was someone heckling but I didn’t hear. The point was that I had a microphone and he didn’t. He is entitled to his freedom of speech, and he has a perfectly legitimate ethical point of view.”
But he went on to say that the arguments advocated by animal rights activists are “completely wrong in some of the pseudo-scientific arguments they use”.
“It is still factually correct that animal testing is a necessity,” he added.
Evan Harris said that the Pro-Test campaign “has been an overall success, showing the public of both the necessity and the benefits of the laboratory.”
Harris’ continued support for the laboratory was backed by Tom Holder, an Oxford student and one of the main organisers of the march.
Holder believes that there are widespread misconceptions about animal testing and argues that “it should go ahead for better welfare for the scientists and the animals."“It is something about which people don’t always consider all the facts,” he said. “A lot of people still think cosmetic testing is carried out, this is categorically not true. Cosmetic testing has been illegal in the UK since 1999."
In 2006, after gathering 500 signatures in a matter of days, Pro-Test forced OUSU to hold an university student-wide referendum on animal testing. 90.4% of the votes backed a motion supporting animal testing and the building of the Oxford laboratory.In 2008, the march attracted only 200 supporters, in contrast to the 600 of 2006. However, Holder still maintained that the decrease in numbers also shows how Pro-Test is winning the debate.
“It is becoming an increasingly uncontroversial issue with the public mood now one of acceptance. Perhaps this was reflected in the turn out at the march; people are becoming less involved,” he said.
However, a spokesperson for SPEAK, an organisation which campaigns for animal rights, dismissed both the importance of the march and the completion of the new biomedical facility.
She denied that the Pro-Test movement was making headway with the public. She said, “The very poor attendance at the demonstration illustrates that the public do not support the mutilation and brutalisation of animals in the name of so-called science.”
“We are quite ready for the next phase of our campaign to change the facility from an animal torture institution to one for alternatives for animal testing,” she added.
A notice on SPEAK’s website urges supporters to protest at its “Oxford Degree Days Demo” on the 1st March.
Watch the Cherwell24 Video report of the rally.

Review by Frankie Parham 

Evidently February is the month when everyone is up the duff.  While a teen-flick about pregnancy, Juno, is raking in the box office profits, Katie McGettigan has directed an equally triumphant production of Amelia Whittington’s Be My Baby.  

Set in 1964, we follow the progress of nineteen year-old Mary Adams (Alexandra Hedges), now in her seventh month of pregnancy, unmarried and forced by her prim mother (Frances Rose) to live in a private hospice. Despite the unsympathetic Matron (Camille Watts), the dreary institution has its comforts: Mary befriends three other inmates, similarly all heaving their literal and emotional burdens. Dolores (Crissy Taylor) is the lovingly dappy northerner, contrasting with the sombre Norma (Helen Harvey) and brutally honest Queenie (Jenni Payne). Together, they discover the realities of their positions; they are helpless in a world where money, husband and home are to be their concerns. Love doesn’t come into it.  

In the bland setting of Exeter’s Saskatchewen room (however exotic that name might sound) you really get the sense of some drab ’60s institution for badly behaved girls. Hedges, ceaselessly quivering with nervous naivety, brings an infective enthusiasm to her character, creating a foundation for the play to stand on. Similarly impressive are her three fellow “sinners”: Harvey is a brilliantly restrained Norma, allowing her angst to gradually increase to the point of madness, while Taylor is consistently genuine for all her childish idiocy. Payne probably has the hardest job as the predictable cynic with a soft centre, but she brings credibility to the role. Ultimately, she draws the most pathos from an audience that has already had its sympathies sucked up by all the others: from the beginning, the shocking reasons why each character is there are slowly revealed. Even Watts’ Matron, who runs the place with the cold sobriety of a Nurse Ratchet, eventually exposes her pitiable suffering with particular subtlety.  

For a man’s world, the play is refreshingly deficient of any male roles. A guy would have a lot to live up to with this cast, since Katie and her gang have truly shown what Oxford drama is all about. Seizing occupation of an abandoned classroom, borrowing some theatre lights and probably using their own clothes, the girls – unlike their ’60s counterparts – have done it their way. How things have changed…  
 

4/5 

7:30pm Wed/Thurs

Turl Street Arts Festival: Saskatchewen Room, Exeter College

The increasingly open race for promotion to the First Division saw another twist on Friday as an impressive Pembroke College won at St John's.  As yet unbeaten in the league in Hilary Term, and unbeaten at home for fifty weeks, St John's went into the game as favourites.  Pembroke, however, outfought and outplayed St John's to win a tough and tense match 3-1.  It was the home team that took an early lead after four minutes.  Top scorer Matt Evans-Young was found unmarked on the edge of the area and passed into the net his twelfth of the season.  What followed was an open game, with both teams playing attractive passing football, lacking the bitterness which soured the second half.  Evans-Young almost doubled the lead twenty minutes after his first, having taken the ball past the Pembroke keeper, only for right back Rob Gates to intervene with a heroic last ditch tackle.  At the other end of the pitch, play was dominated by the yellow booted Etienne Ekpo-Utip.  Combining the touch and height of Berbatov with the pace and strength of Henry, he was the outstanding footballer of the afternoon.  He had a strong claim for a penalty turned down soon after following a collision with Clem Naylor.  With only two minutes to go in the first half, a similar incident produced a different result as the spot kick was given.  Ekpo-Utip drove the ball past Alex Berend, for the goal which was fair reward for his performance.  

The second half started slowly, the best chance being an Ali Craggs free-kick hitting the wall.  On the hour mark, the game started to develop an unpleasant edge.  A late challenge from Ekpo-Utip on John's centre half Paul Eastham raised complaints from the touchline, and a dispute over a tackle in midfield led to a scuffle in the centre circle.  Adam Taylor was at the heart of it, as he was for many of the flare ups after half time.  On sixty five minutes, Ekpo-Utip's second goal put Pembroke ahead.  Cutting in from the left, he shrugged off challenges from Eastham and his centre back partner Steve Jennings, and placed the ball into the bottom corner. 

 Four minutes later, an injury to Pembroke right back Rob Gates allowed for a necessary cooling down period.  Gates, challenging James Earle, fell awkwardly and dislocated his shoulder.  Play was halted as Gates was taken off the pitch and an ambulance was called.  After a six minute stoppage, cooler heads prevailed.  

The replacement of Stu Faragher with Sam Freedman signalled John's intent, but the increased space in their half was well exploited by Pembroke.  Both Chris Stovin and Taylor, playing off the dominant Ekpo-Utip, went close in the last ten minutes.  The win was sealed in the last few minutes when Stovin's shot from the edge of the box was deflected by Dave Parsons over Berend and into the net.  It confirmed the three points for a strong and competitive side who now have as good a chance for promotion as St John's or any of the other competitors. 

Review by Rees Arnott-Davies.One anticipates when seeing a play in a foreign language (especially one so distant as Mandarin) that something is always going to be lost in translation. Unfortunately, this was very much proved to be the case by 'I Love Peach Blossom', a play seeming to offer so much, but unfortunately failing to deliver. Sitting in the audience watching the breakdown of not only a relationship, but also reality, I felt all too shackled by the prison-house of language.
      
This is not to say that 'I Love Peach Blossom' didn’t have its moments. In particular, the progression from comic to tragic is carried out practically without fault, adding to the dramatic effect. Furthermore, the blurring of the lines between the suffocating reality that engulfs the lives of the characters, and the impossible play that they are trying to stage, is ultimately successful. One gets a very real sense that fiction is, for the characters, the only reality that they can escape to when their lives have reached an impasse or they are close to collapsing about their heads. And it is this sense of a deferring of the inevitability of the passage of life, which raises the play up, which makes believable what one might otherwise consider too simplistic or two-dimensional.Unfortunately, these moments of excellence are undermined by more material problems. The fact that the play is translated for the audience on a screen behind the actual stage can, at its best, lead to unintentional Brechtian moments of alienation, and at its worst lead to an entire breakdown in the dramatic project. I will not go into specifics, but needless to say, it is inadvisable to place the concluding revelation on the play slap-bang in the middle of the stage before the final scene has even started. Equally, the translation leaves more than a little to be desired, demeaning a script that might in the right hands have sparkled with vitality.
       
Nonetheless, one must always jump at the opportunity of experiencing a cultural production from outside one’s own social background, and if you were to take nothing at all away from seeing I Love Peach Blossom apart from the realisation that there is another side to theatre besides that approved by the Arts Council of Britain, it would still be worth it.

Review by Frankie ParhamConflict can always make good drama. From Homer’s Iliad to Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, warfare offers the perfect environment for man to seek the answers to questions of morality and consequently recognise his own insignificance in a brutal world. Max Seddon and Ben Judah, creators of The Desert of the Real, seem to strive for the same artistic profundity – and they almost do it.First we meet Nick (Rupert Cohen), an archetypal Oxford post-grad student,obsessing over his thesis. He is too self-centred to notice that his girlfriend, Alice (Hana Chambers), is only seeking emotional attention when she proposes a trip to Iraq.  Alice, however, ends up actually going, enlisting the help of the mysterious Dr. Regev (James Schneider) an Israeli born in Baghdad. We follow her tumultuous journey towards the capital via a crazed driver (Roger Granville), Dr. Regev’s psychopathic friend Jamal (Oliver Harvey) and an unstable American officer (John Maher).Back in Oxford, Nick pines for his girlfriend, whining at the long-suffering Chloe (Rachel Smith), who happily welcomes the arrival of charismatic Ibrahim al-Ansarn (James Kingston). The alleged Arab arts enthusiast is in fact a terrorist, out to capture Nick in an attempt to blackmail his father, who aided the start of nuclear warfare in Ibrahim’s homeland.The plot itself reflects how much Seddon and Judah are giving their audience to deal with, not to mention the number of heart-felt speeches and tantrums they burden their actors with. However, the entire cast take on the difficult task with admirable gusto, and there are a number of performances which truly stand out: Kingston is marvellously erratic, while Granville flexibly doubles as several angry Arabs. Chambers also gives the play a solid backbone, portraying the Oxford student we all relate to – oblivious to the consequences of her actions.Yet, for all the ironic juxtapositions between the petty preoccupations of privileged Westerners and ethnically-charged conflicts of the East, the play never makes clear what message it wishes to give. Are we supposed to feel remorse for Ibrahim and the sufferings of his country, after we have just seen him in a farcical tussle with a “dirty Jew”? The shift in tone is too sudden, similar to the voiceover (which acts as a diversion during scene changes): it’ll suddenly declare that another coup has broken out in the Ukraine or China. Is the world falling apart? Frankly, you don’t know what you’re supposed to be concentrating on by the end.Much of the fun of the play comes from hearing references to Oxford life (prepare for allusions to the Turf and scenes in the King’s Arms), but even this begins to wear thin. The characters are either unexplained (Dr. Regev’s intentions are completely indecipherable) or deserve much more development.  While the last scene hints at Alice’s reasons for escape,too much time is spent pulling at other strings to give an answer. It’s all intriguing enough to go and see, but too confusing to enjoy.
3/5

Max Thompson and Rachel Fraser find out what it is to be a Viking in the 21st century.

Sangwon Yoon and Jenny Moore keep us update on news this week in the mid-week news round up .
 

The excellent German blog Die Achse des Guten ("The Axis of Good") has drawn my attention to this bizarre claim in today's Daily Record:

Legendary [Loch Ness Monster] hunter Robert Rines is giving up his search for the monster after 37 years. … Despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming [my emphasis].

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