Max Seddon 

The problem with experimental theatre is that it’s, well, experimental. You add and take away at random, and you see how it works out. And unfortunately, groundbreaking genius is not always the result. Also, the total lack of characters in Martin Crimp’s play, even at the hands of one of Oxford’s best character actresses, ultimately does Alice Lacey’s production more harm than good here. All we get are some pretty lights and four voices, creating an argumentative, shifting narrative by making grandiloquent pronouncements about the mundane and tugging the "story" back and forth in and out of each others’ control.

Of these four, two are done with aplomb by Charlotte Bayley and Nadira Wallace, members of the burgeoning Oxford ginger actress mafia. Bayley is, for my money, the best of these and one of the best in the university. She is excellent here, sauntering wickedly through the first piece as a woman in a loveless marriage, and an almost teacher-pupil dynamic develops between between her and the other two voices. In a play so static in which the performers are limited to a bare minimum of expression, her turn-of-face, as it were, is exemplary.

Would that the same could be said for Jonny Totman. He pops up in every other play I see these days with varying results, but here I was positively decided. Every word comes out of his mouth in the same shouty, declamatory tone accompanied by a caveman-discovering-fire gaze. Bayley displays better range in seconds than he does through most of the play.

Yet I can’t hold him solely responsible here; Alice Lacey’s casting must take some blame. Bayley seems wasted sitting onstage for long periods doing nothing. Ultimately the biggest problem is Crimp. The play’s forays into Sarah Kane territory are horribly cringe. Gratuitous swearing and kicking chairs over was great fun when I was 9 but having reached the heights of this lofty educational establishment I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect something more profound in our petulant outbursts.

More importantly, even the best moments never create much tension. Neither the tales of bourgeois ennui nor wafts of reference to the Dunblane massacre ever really grabbed me, whichever voice was talking about them. The mood is limp and linear throughout, a tone run home by the extremely annoying Radio Clash murder ballad at the end of the second piece. Minimalism of form is no excuse for a sacrifice of feeling. Ultimately both production and play are more pretentious than portentous and I couldn’t help thinking a bit more meat and potatoes would have been nice. Fewer Emergencies is worth a try, not least on Bayley’s strengths, but it’s really no substitute for characters, plot, and all that jazz. But hey, call me old-fashioned.Dir. Alice Lacey

16-20th October

The recent annual inundation of fresh-faced new students has led to the inevitable freshers’ week fatigue, as party follows party and every drink has a one penny piece settled threateningly on the glass’s bottom. Freshers’ week brought the obligatory nightly excursion out clubbing, with a house party or two thrown in for good measure. We all did it once, but there’s something truly obnoxious about these naïve and ever so over-excited people who think that everything is just the most exciting thing in the world.
I spent several evenings last week stepping over such newcomers as they cowered in the street, holding back their hair and shivering in their mini-skirts. Admittedly, one year ago this was me carrying my paralytic new friends back to college, but now that the shoe is on the other foot it’s all a little unnerving. Were we ever this young? Were we ever that excited about a house party in Cowley? Sadly the answer is yes. So here’s to the freshers who truly don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for. Enjoy it while it lasts, before you have your first essay crisis and slip secretly into your overdraft. Before you know it there’ll be a new crowd emerging from the woodwork, and you’ll begin to wonder when you got so old.
Of course, while throngs of unknowing newcomers went off into the night for a casual pull in the shadowy corners of the Bridge, some of us were already in the library, doing the summer reading that we never quite got round to doing and writing the essays that were due two days before. So which was worse? First years over-doing their first week of unadulterated, independent university life, or those who should know better squeezing too much work into too little time?  Freshers’ week was our last chance to have seven days of packing in as many random celebrations into such little time for at least a term, so hopefully everyone managed to tear themselves away from their studies for at least one night. If you missed it though, try to let your inner fresher out once in a while, even for one night of carefree clubbing. Perhaps I’ll see you in the gutter.

The Oxford University men’s badminton team got off to strong start in the league against old rivals Cambridge. The rivalry between the varsity universities can often be quite heated but the badminton fixture is notable as much for the mutual respect that each side gives to one another as the fierce competitiveness it brings out in the players.

Oxford’s new captain Ryan Manual had put together a strong team which made use of some handy new recruits. Ryan set off strongly by beating his Cambridge counterpart 21-12 and 21-11. In the second singles, Melvin Chen got off to flying start against Cambridge star-man Lars Boyde, racing to a 15-7 lead. Unfortunately, the class of his opponent meant that Melvin went down to 23-21, 21-18 loss.

In the doubles Oxford fielded two freshers and at this stage of the season it was always going to be an experiment. Kelvin Kwok partnered Simon Maine and, after a less than impressive start, began to show some class. Kwok lived up to his new nickname ‘Kid Dynamite’ and played some sublime shots, eventually helping the Oxford pair to win 18-21, 21-13, 21-15. In the other doubles, veteran Gareth Alexander teamed up with David Williams. Despite looking the better pair at times, Gareth and David eventually succumbed and lost 21-12, 21-13.

With honours even Oxford very much fancied themselves to pull through with a slim victory. Unfortunately, disaster struck as Oxford’s captain fell awkwardly whilst playing Lars Boyde and had to retire early. Simon Maine and Kwok began to look much more coherent as a partnership and managed to beat the much more fancied Cambridge pairing. Gareth and David made their match look harder than it needed to be but eventually won. Oxford were denied an overall victory when Melvin Chen failed to beat his opponent despite working hard.

The final score at four games apiece fails to do justice to the quality of the Blues play in this match and prospects for this year’s varsity and league competition look bright.

There seem to be two specific ways to be the tute partner from hell. Simply put, you can be very, very good or very, very bad, and I would imagine most people have had their fair share of both.
Take the good kind to start with. This is the sort of person who gets out next week’s books this week, frets if they haven’t read every single thing on the reading list, including supplementary material, the stuff tutors have a tendency to label as “for background”. What’s more, they’ve usually done next week’s reading this week, and if there is, as there so often is, only one copy of a given book floating around Oxford, they’ll have it. And they’re not letting it go, so don’t even think about it. Go and hide in a corner of Blackwell’s like the other plebs.
So, after a week of aggravation, you present yourself at your tutorial having quite possibly had no sleep for two days, with your hastily-researched handful of paper that barely qualifies as an essay, but is nevertheless, you are pleased to note, in continuous prose and maybe even almost, if you squint, two thousand words long. You run in all of a tizzy, sit down, run a hand through your hair, blink hard a couple of times and try to look intelligent. So far, so good.
Now here comes your tute partner. Bright, breezy, immaculately attired, folder held carefully in perfectly manicured hands, they sit and read out their perfect, publishable essay, addressing every relevant point and argument in liquid-smooth lexis. And when they’ve finished, they sit back, smile beatifically and say, “Oh, I’m sorry it’s not quite up to scratch, I had a lot on this week.”
The tutor effuses. You lean back in the squashy armchair, have a serious think about your intellectual credentials and hope for the cushions to swallow you whole.
Whether or not this is preferable to the other sort of hellish tute partner is a matter up for debate. This is the type who rings up six hours before the tute, whether or not it’s four am, to demand books, because “I just haven’t had time.” They get extra points for thinking this explanation is somehow hilarious, or for smelling – yes, even down the phone – noticeably of alcohol. Whereas you have, at least, tried to make a start more than a day before the deadline, and so arrive in the tutorial equipped with some sketchy things to say and a contingency bullshit plan if the tutor is less than impressed, your partner flumps into a chair, twenty minutes later, and proceeds to sleep for the next three quarters of an hour. You’re left to hold up the discussion by yourself, subtly nudging your partner with your foot to no avail; he or she snores happily on while you rapidly run out of things to say. For that truly hellish touch, though, it’s best if your partner then wakes up all at once five minutes before the end, delivers a grin all round, and says brightly, “That was good, wasn’t it?” before disappearing in the direction of the pub.
This isn’t, of course, an exhaustive assessment. Honourable mentions remain for several other breeds. Take the tute partner who writes essays that are variations on good, bad, or mediocre, but never less than four thousand words long, so by the time they’ve finished reading you’ve long since forgotten the topic, anything you were going to say about it and indeed, most of the twenty-first century.
Then there’s the ones who, for whatever reason, don’t believe in checking their email, or worse, in talking at all. On the other side of that coin, there’s the tute partner who’s so breathlessly enthusiastic, and so very keen to talk about everything that they’ve ever read, that you don’t get a word in edgeways, and are reduced to hoping they’ll eventually stop through lack of oxygen and you can say what you wanted to say while they’re gasping like a codfish on the floor. Anecdotally, this problem seems to arise for women in male-dominated subjects
In conclusion, there are as many levels of hell as would keep Dante happy, and each has its own exquisite tortures. Which is not to say this is not all very melodramatic and Oxford is not stuffed full of nice, considerate, intellectually sane people who are a pleasure to be in tutorials with. If you have such a partner, go and buy them a drink. And if not, well. Get one for yourself. You deserve it.

It started so innocently. You went to the show after-party hoping to meet the fit lead, and sensing that your pretentious chat might be deemed lacking, steer the conversation to a safer area; proclaiming yourself more of the ‘practical type’. You keep them happy and get your way. Fortunately, you are good at this. Unfortunately, someone’s noticed. Suddenly the fatal question looms: "have you ever thought about producing?" Were your inner sceptic not so very sozzled on champagne it would have seized muscle control from your flirting centres and thrown you physically out of the door, fleeing the drama scene for the cult it is. But you succumb, as have so many of Oxford’s mass of the directionless-yet-driven, to your deep and abiding terror of saying no.

And now you’re supposed to know what’s going on when you’re not even sure how you got to be here. You’ve got Excel help open and it’s not helping, a physicist friend on the phone who claims that the funds for poster-printing, VAT, and amorphous other charges can be understood but only in base 4 quadratics.

It will only get better, as inevitably the accumulated mass of all the egos you’re working with drags your entire life into a drama-centred orbit. You have few friends who have not contributed something to one of your shows, whether it be designing your set, lighting, sound, costumes or print; op-ing, building or lending something (so this is how roleplayers with collections of medieval weaponry make friends). The rowers you know are carrying set, the wannabe politicians are ‘marketing assistants’and everyone you ever really cared about is pissed off, because you lied about how much work stage managing, front of housing, and all those interminable little ‘favours’ you begged of them would turn out to be. What a good thing all those theatre managers, techies, a series of succeeding Drama Officers, and half the OUDS and ETC’s committees know you, otherwise you might start to wonder what’s the point.

 Why you should go to Keble to see Holman Hunt's Light of The WorldBy Claudia Rimmigton With the exception of the high profile Millais exhibition at Tate Britain this autumn, the Pre-Raphaelites do not usually get a very good press. Possibly because their reputation tends to focus on a few unfortunate works such as  Rossetti’s “Luscious Lovelies”- stylised depictions of plump Victorian women- and some nature works, like Ford Maddox Brown’s The Pretty Baa Lambs.
To think that the Pre-Raphaelites were all sweetness and light, however, would be a gross misconception. Much of their work is serious and visually powerful. William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (1853) is an excellent example.  
The picture shows Christ standing in an eerie orchard just before daybreak. He is crowned, robed and bejewelled, and stares directly at the viewer. Shining lantern in one hand, he is shown knocking on the door of a hut while his eyes searchingly penetrate the viewer. The surroundings are dark with the sun gently rising. Dew can still be seen on the ground and a bat hovers overhead.
Inscribed in the frame is a text from Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”
The door referred to in the text and shown in the painting symbolises the human conscience. The crux is that there is no handle, which means that it can only be opened by its owner and not by God alone. The brambles and weeds at the foot of the door suggest that it has not been opened for a while, and show that the faith has been allowed to whither. The dawn light, however, represents hope that the door might be opened, and the possibility of renewal. According to Hunt, “I painted the picture with what I thought, unworthy as I was, to be by Divine command, and not simply as a good subject.”
As a devout evangelist living in 1850s Britain, Hunt thought that worshippers needed such a painting. The church was going through a period of schism. Many Oxford dons, such as John Henry Newman, had converted to Catholicism from Protestantism in 1848 and had caused many bitter quarrels and disputes by the early 1850s.  One consequence of this was the formation of the Oxford movement, which aimed to encourage more authority in the English church. The Light of the World would later go on to inspire the Salvation Army composer, Sir Dean Goffin, to write one of his most famous compositions also entitled “The Light of the World”.
Bearing this climate in mind, it is easy to see why Hunt depicted Christ as a calm but authoritative figure. Viewers commented that the degree of realism made it seem as if Christ was actually there, looking straight into the eyes of the beholder.  His paintings are notable for their strong colour, elaborate symbolism and exquisite detail, and it is well worth exploring his other forays into religious expression. Though it is tempting to mark this as a piece of Victorian irrationality, I can see where they were coming from.

 By Natasha Vashisht 

THREE students are to be disciplined after a dumbbell hit the window of a Junior Dean’s residence during a drunken prank in the early hours of Monday morning.

The undergraduates, who had been drinking heavily, caused the disturbance at Brasenose College’s Frewin Annexe on St Michael’s Street at around 3am last Monday while playing with a dumbbell.

Two of the students, second-years at University College, have since been banned for one year from entering the Brasenose accommodation site. The other student, a fresher at Brasenose, was allegedly threatened with being sent down.

One of the Univ second-years decided to come forward on hearing that the fresher, who was not directly involved in the incident, was facing suspension and the possibility of permanent expulsion.

After meeting at a club earlier in the evening, the students returned to the Brasenose student’s accommodation and decided to throw dumbbells around the courtyard. One dumbbell hit a light before another hit the Junior Dean’s bedroom window, who then came out to caution the students. The fresher was marched off while the two Univ students were free walk back to their college.

Having since come forward, both second-years will be disciplined by the University College Dean.

The Brasenose fresher, who is still awaiting a final disciplinary decision, said, "I don’t remember much from that night at all. I was told that one of the Univ students threw a dumbbell at the light and that’s how the Junior Dean knew we were causing a disturbance. When he asked me who I was, I did try to lie about it. I then had to see the Principal, and he said I had to be cooperative to get a more lenient punishment."One of the Univ second-years apologised for the incident, saying, "I am deeply sorry. Although nothing was broken and nobody was injured, it was a reckless and drunken thing to do. As soon as I heard a fresher was in trouble for my actions I came forward straight away to accept the consequences." Brasenose authorities refused to comment on the incident.

By Alexander ChristofiD ante, Petrarch and Boccaccio were, it’s fair to say, probably the most interesting thing to come out of medieval Italy. The reason that they were given the nickname Le Tre Corone is because they were at the head of a newfound interest in literature, love, and people themselves. Dante’s Commedia remains one of the greatest religious and political poems since classical times, and die-hard fans even call it ‘the fifth gospel’. Petrarch was one of the first people to address humanist issues (some of his more enthusiastic followers claim he started the Renaissance) whilst Boccaccio wrote stories about sex. But they were very good stories about sex, and there were a hundred of them. In many ways, then, the Three Crowns are a big deal.
However, it’s not just a celebration of how good these writers were. The exhibition looks at their influence on later generations and how it developed, and gives some insight into how their works were interpreted. Though there are some displays of early annotated texts, the emphasis is strongly on visual representations and illustrations, from the early 15th century to the modern day.
In the early years, the most popular of the three authors was undoubtedly Petrarch. The illustrations in the early editions are interesting in themselves, and interpreting them is almost as rich as interpreting the texts. They show us how the poems were seen through the eyes of the time. An early edition of Petrarch’s Trionfi (Venice 1470-80) depicts Petrarch sitting with his forever unrequited love, Laura, on a riverbank – an interesting image, since Petrarch never spoke to Laura during her lifetime. Opposite is a meeting of nine philosophers, presumably highlighting Petrarch’s less romantic side. To see the two next to each other, though, is to give a colour illustration of the poet’s incongruous aspirations. In other editions, cameos of Petrarch introduce the first sonnet of the Canzoniere (‘Book of Poems’ to you and I). In an edition from 1450-75 (Ferrara), the first page is framed by another cameo, of Laura, and a small picture of a locked book. You feel like an intruder as if you are opening somebody else’s diary, and gazing at their deep and well-rhymed secrets. It captures perfectly the intimacy of the poems.
The comedy vote, however, must go to the edition which depicts Petrarch being crowned in the top left, women gossiping in the bottom left, and a man who appears to be beating his dog with a stick in the bottom right.
The earliest Dante in the collection is historically, if not altogether visually, interesting. The illustrator, possibly semi-illiterate, has misread the bit where Dante mentions an eagle on a banner, and has drawn a knight holding an eagle in the middle of the picture. There are some incredibly rare editions of the Commedia, though, which are fascinating. The Bodleian holds the first edition in which the Comedy becomes The Divine Comedy (1555 Venice), printed by Lodovico Dolce. The important Florence 1481 edition is also there, opened to the page where Dante meets Virgil and escapes the forest and some animals. The picture here is one of the best, contorting reality to suit its purposes. The canopy is only just over Dante’s head, the path obstructed by the crowding animals, and the trees around the edge of the picture are even smaller, giving a real feeling of claustrophobia.
There are a couple more editions of Petrarch, and the poet’s own heavily annotated copy of Suetonis, which is nifty because you can see what his handwriting looked like- very neat as it happens. The last we see of Petrarch is a 1503 text where an angry Catholic has tried to burn out the three anti-papal sonnets in the Canzoniere, proving that people did once care about poetry.
The section on Boccaccio is smaller than the other two, but more visually rich. There are late 15th century editions from France and Italy, some of them intricate volumes for a courtly audience – they are beautifully and minutely detailed, gilded and colourful. In a French edition of Filostrato (France 1480), a man with absurdly pointy feet is kissing a woman with almost vital energy. It’s not the Karma Sutra, but after seeing the stern illustrations of the other two Crowns, you can see that Boccaccio took a massive step towards the sort of humanism that we take for granted.
For those not so interested in old-fashioned images, the Bodleian has a few interesting modern illustrations. In the last two hundred years, Petrarch and Boccaccio have fallen out of favour with the reading public, but if anything, interest in Dante has boomed. As well as Tom Phillips’ brilliant original illustrations for his Inferno (including King Kong, comic book frames and an arse trumpet), there is a picture of Dante eulogizing the fall of Humpty Dumpty, and even a slightly odd link to our own glorious university – a picture of Dante hulking austerely over a fat little Oxford don.

This is not an easy play to watch. Such contentious topics as Iraq, spin journalism and sadomasochism are not merely explored, but taken apart, and often in painful detail. The script plunges the depths of the human psyche, revealing the more unpalatable aspects of everything from patriotism to sex – which is not to suggest that Guardians sacrifices entertainment for worthiness; the interspersed moments of humour, whilst uncomfortable, are also very, very funny. I almost didn’t dare laugh on occasions when the brutal humour teetered on the edge of what is bearable, but the irreverent approach and complete absence of political correctness are refreshing.

The difficult line between the acceptable and the unacceptable is expertly trod by Mark Cartwright and Rebecca Gibson, who managed to command my entire attention for an hour and a half of interspersed monologues. This is even more impressive considering the fact that ‘English Boy’ and ‘American Girl’ are unsympathetic characters taken to the extreme. Yet Cartwright imbues his grasping, amoral journalist with an almost hypnotic charisma, whilst Gibson’s long-suffering soldier had my empathy even as she recounted acts impossible to contemplate. Not only is Gibson’s accent spot-on, but she embodies ‘American Girl’ down to every twitch and shuffle, and manages to convey a sense of lurking vulnerability. The intimate nature of the monologues, combined with the skill of the cast in melding the personal and the political, create an atmosphere where the audience feels like a voyeur, almost implicated in the increasingly bleak events as they are retold. ‘English Boy’ describes visiting a bondage club as like ‘going to hell as a tourist’, and that fits this production perfectly.

Director Will Measham is ‘fed up with student apathy’, and as wake-up calls go, this is unignorable. You could call Guardians ‘spin’ of a different sort – counter-spin, if you will – but its versions of the truth are extremely persuasive. What’s more, the gritty realism of the acting and the sparseness of the direction combine to create a production in which I can find nothing to criticize. This play isn’t going to be for everyone – certainly not for those who go to the theatre for light-hearted escapism – but it is uncomfortably good.