Sunday 27th July 2025
Blog Page 827

Life Divided: The case against black tie

Anoushka Kavanagh
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Life Divided: The case against black tie

It’s midnight. Your feet feel as though an elephant has trodden on them – or, if you are lucky, are now totally numb – from the heels your toes are sticking out at unnatural angles from. And you’re groggy and chilly as the effects of weak alcohol have worn off. The black tie ball that started out so beautifully is no longer so beautiful.

After a long cloakroom queue behind likeminded sufferers, you welcomingly snatch your sneakers like the lifeline they are and head back to the dance tent. Only your gown is now far too long for you minus the artificial six inches, and you accidentally step on the trail, snagging it. That perfect dress you spent *literally months* searching for on Asos, instead of writing the essays you should have been writing, is now ruined. As a saving grace, you remember you couldn’t possibly wear it again anyway, because, oh god, it would be social suicide to be seen in the same dress at a black tie event twice.

Not only are you drunkenly tearful about this minor wardrobe disaster, but you’re also now cold. Shame you didn’t think about how chilly British May nights are when admiring your own cleavage. You look enviously to the boys prancing around in their waiter-like uniforms, complete with warm jacket. Black tie’s probably not so bad if you only have to throw on a tux.

One of them takes pity on you standing shivering and staggers over inebriated to offer you some warmth. What a gentleman! Until… “You can have my coat if you sleep with me” he slurs. What a prick. You come to the conclusion that he must be a member of that stalwart of misogyny, the Bullingdon. Why else would he look so good in a tux – you’ve heard that’s an entry requirement. Besides, you remember reading it in Cherwell, so he must be, right?

Touch, tenderness, and technology in Cloud of Petals

Eleanor Birdsall-Smith
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Touch, tenderness, and technology in Cloud of Petals

Sarah Meyohas’s Cloud of Petals grants its audience no time to adapt or understand before it launches forward. We are immediately hit with its startling power, as thick thumbs rub the clitoral centre of a plump dusty pink rose. Yet, while at times erotic and deeply seductive, it is not just about sex.

Set over the course of four days, the installation aims to address perceptions of beauty as well as the relationship between nature and technology. In a sentence out of context, this sounds appalling, tired and clichéd, yet remarkably it manages to almost completely avoid all of these usual shortcomings. The brief premise of the film follows sixteen men who were chosen to carefully and diligently pick flowers they deemed to be the most beautiful.

These flowers were then used and explored in a laboratory designed by the renowned Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. Over 100,000 petals of all different types and colours were both physically pressed and uploaded to a cloud system. This leads us to the interesting way Meyohas interprets the relationship between beauty, nature and technology: “This film traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence,” says Meyohas. “From the trove of images taken by
the ‘workers’, an artificial intelligence algorithm is created, allowing for the creation of new, unique petals forever.”

However, while the concept behind the piece is intriguing and brilliant in its own right, it is the finished spectacle that truly amazes. It is filled with fast pace transitions which make your tummy turn and your heart swell. This manages to strike an interesting balance between uncomfortable and exciting, for instance at one point focus is put on the thick bodies of Burmese pythons as they slip scale by scale past the rose petals, until we are suddenly but seamlessly zooming beneath an amass of exposed rubber wires and tubes in the ceiling, which otherwise would have remained ordinary and overlooked.

This sense of unity and connection continues throughout with a particular emphasis on line and geometry, which somehow manages to stay tied down to the experiment at hand, with almost Orwellian imagery of men working within this bizarre factory full of grids and parameters.  There are also beautifully tender moments, as a child laces glimmering blue blurs into the hair of another, which then, a little jarringly, are revealed to be little blue bottle flies. Yet it is at times undeniably sensual in a way no romance novel, film or porno ever could be.

It will hit you in the depth of your chest, exciting your heart and mind and inciting desire
purely though its keen focusing on the impact of the touch. It embraces its electronic form and presentation through an ongoing house fly motif, which flits between being on video, and physically resting on the screen which displays the video. This enables the shots of the cloud and loading icons to continue the narrative without becoming trying or cringe inducing.

The sombre and foreboding soundtrack to the video adds a weight to the piece, which on its own could seem fleeting frivolous and skittish with its quick paced shot changes, yet in combination becomes serious and almost scary. The actual music has the same effect as trailers for blockbusters, which inexplicably give you goose bumps in the cinema, however this is also combined with interspersed moments of ASMR-style whispers. The result is that the video seems to hit every sense, setting the body on fire. Tuning in to the intricacies of human sensation, the piece above anything else seeks to invite emotional response.

At no point is the narrative (to use the term loosely) or themes of the piece driven home or flagged up for the easy consumption of the viewer, enhancing and stretching the accepted ‘show not tell’ principle.

Cloud of Petals is on show at Red Bull Arts, New York, through 10 December 2017, but an extended cut is available to stream via ‘nowness.com’ as part of their ‘Video Art Visions’ series, which also has many other beguiling pieces from a variety of different sources.

Is high fashion more accessible than ever?

Chloe Dootson-Graube
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Is high fashion more accessible than ever?

As it is said, fashion weeks come and fashion weeks go, but LFW SS18 was marked by a certain revelation; Burberry produced its second ever collection to deliver the product straight from the runway to the consumer, with clothing seen on the models available to the regular buyer instantly, in-store and online. When this scheme was launched it was predicted that it would cause a shake-up within haute couture, as the fashion industry is a delicate equilibrium sustained through its seasonal schedule and demand-supply based enterprise.

As SS18 didn’t end in flaming carnage run through with mobs of the masses, one can only assume that these fears were misplaced. Together with the rise of livestreamed shows and collections becoming viewable online, could this signify a movement to a fashion industry that is less elitist in its approach to both its creators and buyers? The fashion editors decided to take ourselves out of the office to investigate. After a couple of weeks of planning, we arrived at Covent Garden bedecked in fashion week appropriate attire (read: looking very extra). We entitled this venture ‘Budget Fashion Week’, as it turns out the likes of Burberry, Shrimps and their other reasonably large compatriots aren’t willing to dole out tickets to student journalists with a week’s notice.

This is fine, and indeed the question is already partly answered: no, haute couture is not particularly accessible to student journalists, not even such illustrious ones as ourselves. We decided that Christopher Kane probably did not issue an invitation on account of some bitterness towards Cherwell Fashion’s recent Croc exposé. As we have said, this is fine. Haute couture hates student journalism, but it is fine. So we find ourselves at Fashion Scout at Covent Garden’s Freemason’s Hall to watch Leaf XIA and Irynvigre. Fashion Scout, to the uninitiated, is a venue that seeks to showcase lesser known and upcoming designers, and is subsequently one of the most accessible spots in London Fashion Week.

For Leaf XIA, we were ushered to a standing spot in the back, which provided an optimal view of the the audience; for Irynvigre we were landed with whopping second row seats.
In terms of looks, Leaf XIA seemed to encapsulate the term ‘kawaii’ with lurid fabrics and dolly shapes. MIA played in the background. For a moment, I was truly happy. Irynvigre was certainly a brand, as it was termed, ‘for rich bitches’ – floaty and sheer garments glided down the runway on ethereal models.

Never in my life, I remarked, had I ever seen anyone nearly as tall as the barefoot models on that runway. Sizing of models and subsequently, collections remains a staple criticism in the accessibility debate, and with good reason, too, as neither of us could physically envisage ourselves in these clothes without looking like some kind of textile based art installation.

However, Fashion Week is just as much about fashion as a culture as it is about the clothing, and despite the various efforts to livestream and show collections remotely, some- thing is lost in translation. You won’t be told about the various orgies that have occurred in the venue and the conspiracy theories of its founder by means of livestream.

Notable front rowers across the event included someone who was wearing an inflatable costume who is apparently semi-famous, members of what could equally be a cult or a Russian boyband wearing matching jackets emblazoned with the logo ‘the Fourth Kingdom,’ somebody who we thought was in JLS but was probably not, and many other gorgeous people. Fashion Scout, we conferred, is truly the promised land.

We even spotted Molly Goddard, dresser to Rihanna, in a very puffy creation of her own design. I think it is therefore fair to say that Fashion Week is therefore a place where the fantastical is realised. That which only exists in the collective unconscious, and by extension, Instagram is projected onto the streets before us.

In this respect, we certainly got the fashion week experience, budget or not. While we certainly weren’t doing bumps of coke off Mr Burberry’s Chest (the true fashion week experience?) the fact that we had the opportunity to take a seat at the showcasing of new British talent is a compelling argument for the idea that high fashion is finally becoming accessible to a new audience.

More Slush than Snow – The Snowman fails to impress

Jonnie Barrow
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More Slush than Snow – The Snowman fails to impress

No film this year constitutes a more ignoble failure than Tomas Alfredson’s (Let The Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) Scandi-snoozefest detective film The Snowman. At least other bad films this year looked bad from the outset: The Emoji Movie had a snowball’s chance in hell of being good, The Dark Tower’s production problems were publicised well in advance, and nobody ever cared about Transformers 5. But The Snowman has such a wealth of talent in front of and behind the camera (the executive-producer is none other than Martin Scorsese) that its failures seem even more pronounced than other terrible movies this year.

Michael Fassbender (in a performance more dreary than I’d ever thought him capable of) plays Harry Hole, a detective who you’d be forgiven for thinking is absolutely rubbish at his job if other characters didn’t inexplicably tell us he’s the “Best Detective Ever”. He teams up with a new recruit (Rebecca Ferguson) to find and stop a serial killer who keeps leaving snowmen at the scenes of his murders. The film never explains why he does this.

Not only are none of the performances even passable, but the story itself makes very little sense. Desperate to understand the train-wreck I’d just witnessed, I rushed home from the cinema to find out how a director who has previously been so clearly obsessed with creating coherence out of convolutions in Tinker Tailor could create such a bafflingly hard-to-follow mess here. It transpires that, by his estimates, 10-15% of the screenplay wasn’t even shot, meaning that essential pieces of the story were forgone in favour of a speedy shooting schedule.

Pieces of flashback sequences starring a laughably awful Val Kilmer are inserted into the story seemingly at random. Elsewhere, whole plot threads are picked up and dropped on a whim, as if the two editors were trying to outdo each other in a game of creating loose end upon loose end to convince the audience to get up and leave. Incomprehensibly edited action scenes and ludicrous plot developments inspire murmurs of incredulity, and mitigate any semblance of payoff the film could’ve had at many key moments.

Everyone on the screen looks bored, and everyone in my screening looked bored too. The film starts badly and, despite glimmers of improvement peeping through the snowy landscape, somehow gets worse the longer it goes on. Blade Runner 2049 is far more worthy of your attention, avoid The Snowman like frostbite.

Exeter would be right to ban smoking, and other colleges should follow

Emily Patterson
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Exeter would be right to ban smoking, and other colleges should follow

Smoking is a habit that affects more people than just the smoker. The effects of second-hand smoke are well-documented, and it is unfair to inflict this upon others without their consent. For everyone arguing that smokers have a right to smoke if they wish to, there is the equal and opposite argument that everybody has the right to clean, fresh air in their home.

Exeter would set a great example by banning smoking in their college grounds, and other colleges should follow suit. With the ban on polluting vehicles set to come into effect in the next few years in Oxford city centre, it makes sense that colleges should be doing what they can on a smaller level to contribute towards a cleaner, greener city.

Those who argue that smoking can provide a coping mechanism for people with anxiety or other mental health issues are missing the point that banning smoking within college grounds does not stop people from smoking, it simply means that they do not do it in a way that makes an impact on other peoples’ lives and health. Even having designated smoking areas does not work – people have to walk past these areas to get to their rooms or tutorials, breathing in the fumes as they go.

At Brasenose, the smoking area on the college site was closed due to the smoke drifting into a student’s bedroom, making the room essentially uninhabitable, and this problem is likely to be present all over the city. Students should not have their health put at risk by other peoples’ life choices. The important issue here is that, yes, people should be free to smoke if they wish to, but not in such a way that it infringes on other peoples’ freedoms.

Banning smoking also sends a clear message against smoking and the negative health effects it causes. It is a personal choice, but we should be doing everything we can to steer people away from making that choice, and we definitely should be protecting other people from the negative health effects of smoking when they don’t smoke themselves.

While colleges are not public spaces, we should remember that they are home to many people, and having an area filling with toxic fumes will not make everybody feel at home there. Colleges are also a place of work for the many staff members, and the main reason for banning smoking in public places such as pubs was to protect the staff.

Exeter has taken the first steps to solving this issue, and it is now the turn of other colleges to do the same. Schools and hospitals ban smoking on their grounds. Why should colleges be any different?

The freshers’ ‘slave auction’ wasn’t just ill-judged banter. It goes deeper

Brian Wong
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The freshers’ ‘slave auction’ wasn’t just ill-judged banter. It goes deeper

Students organising freshers’ week at Loughborough have been criticised for deciding to host a “slave auction” and “slave night”. At first glance, the slave auction appears to be another clichéd relic of banter that is expectedly divisive – some may find it funny, others may find it in bad taste. The decision to prohibit or condemn it is likely to be characterised as one made out of the intent of preventing offence. Of course, I highly doubt that the freshers’ committee is actively racist and does, in fact, condone slavery.

Yet a belief that the backlash against the event is due to the ‘offence’ it causes, neglects the fact that such “humour has repercussive harms for people of colour (PoC) that extend far beyond mere offense. The auction adds to an ongoing trend of appropriating historical injustices under the title of “banter” and “edginess”. It makes campus unwelcome to a core demographic group amongst the freshers that the very committee – ironically – is trying to welcome.

First, the would-be (now cancelled) auction trivialises the abhorrence of slavery. It portrays the dynamic of slavery as a vehicle for entertainment, as a source of comic relief. In particular, scheduling the event during black appreciation month allows for the auction to be read in conjunction with the subjugation of African Americans under the slave trade.

Of course, this is not to say that the joke slave auction is in any way equivalent to genuine slavery. Yet the harms brought about by trivialisation precisely do not derive from the imitation of the full harms of the historical slave trade, but the contrast of horrific images of slavery against the in-jokes and “banter” gained from the process.

The event is disrespectful because it exploits the images and discourses of suffering and places them within a comic context. This argument stands regardless of the demographics of the participants, and the extent to which the par- ticipating parties consent – the harm originates not from how it plays out in actuality, but the very symbolism of slavery being coopted and ‘modified’ for the sake of entertainment.

What’s more, the auction – alongside the “slave night”, “cowboys and Indians”, and various other events lined up for the week – exemplifies an ongoing trend of reappropriation of historical injustices. To laugh, to mock, to pay, to dominate, and to subjugate as a part of the slave auction is to posit that the denigration and dehumanisation of individuals can be funny.

To say dissenting voices “can’t take a joke” suggests that slavery can be a joke. Whilst this may be true for students whose history and current social statuses have suffered little at the hands of the transatlantic slave trade, the same could not be said for PoC who are continually reminded, by pathetic attempts to whitewash public memories that the suffering of there ancestors is up for debate, and can be obfuscated.

The purpose of a freshers’ committee is to make the incoming students feel safe. The experiences of incoming students are supposed to matter – particularly when the entertainment brings along with it little to no constructive value beyond deriving mirth from the wounds and pains of victims of the slave trade in the past.

Finally, such auctions or “banter” make the campus deeply unwelcoming for students of colour. Notice that the very same historical events could be experienced and interpreted differently by individuals from different racial or socioeconomic backgrounds. A white individual may conceptualise slavery as an egregious error, as a relic of the past, and as a historical atrocity that is apparently not in any way equivalent to the parody put on by the freshers’ committee at Loughborough University.

For many students, slavery is an event of the past. Yet for many PoC living in an actively racist society filled with oppressive incarceration complexes, discriminatory employers and police forces, and bigots emboldened by recent events such as Brexit and Trump’s presidency, the power dynamics of white subjugation and dominance are still very much present and active.

For many PoC – particularly freshers who are unlikely to have had extensive opportunities to build up supportive networks of friends at the university prior to arrival – the so-called ‘joke’ auc- tion sends out the signal that the campus may not take their experiences of racism seriously, or that the students they interact with may nd their present subjugation a potential subject of humour.

The “anti-PC” movement brands students who object to racist, sexist, or bigoted speech (in gen- eral) as ‘snow flakes’. It’s easy to accuse others of being snow akes when one is blinded by one’s own privilege. It’s also very easy to nd others’ suffering and historical injustice hilarious “banter” when it’s not you whose historical and present experiences are bound up with the oppression of the past. The liberal consensus is that campus environments are overwhelmingly safe for minorities and oppressed groups. Incidents like those at Loughborough suggest that there is a long way to go prior to that idea becoming the reality.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Bridging the gap between high culture and mass media

Altair Brandon-Salmon
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Andrew Graham-Dixon: Bridging the gap between high culture and mass media

Andrew Graham-Dixon is one of the most famous art historians working today. Thanks to his television series for BBC Four, he has brought to the general public probing accounts of the art of France, Australia, America, and a host of other cultures. Graham-Dixon sees his mission, he explains to me, “[as] doing Civilisation again.” Instead of tackling world art in one concentrated bout, like Kenneth Clarke did in his 1969 series, Graham-Dixon has been surveying the globe’s cultures over a period of three decades.

It is the paucity of art history on television since the nineteen-sixties that motivates Graham-Dixon. Apart from the brief highlights of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) and Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New (1980), the area has been largely ignored by public service broadcasting.

“The range of subjects was so small in the past—even compared to Clarke—there was no mention of the art of Spain [in Civilisation]. Try finding out about Spanish art in English, or even in Spanish.” His programs are proudly didactic, not in a condescending, top-down way, but driven by the desire to educate an enthused audience starved of high quality television.

Educated at Westminster, he went to Christ Church, reading English Literature before graduating in 1981 and moving onto the Courtauld Institute, the art history research institution par excellence, where he gained an MA. On his Oxford days, Graham-Dixon recalls that he was not involved in student newspapers or magazines like Cherwell or The Isis, saying ruefully that “I just sat in a dark room and read fourteen books a week.” Indeed, he relates, “when I finished, they wouldn’t serve me in [Christ Church’s] Buttery as they said I wasn’t a student there!” Instead, he travelled frequently to Bristol University to visit his then girlfriend, and watch Two-Tone bands like The Specials.

After university, Graham-Dixon entered journalism, writing for Vogue and the recently-founded Independent, describing his drive as borne out of his twin pleasures: “All I knew was that I was going to be a writer. I was always interested in art, so one thing lead to another really.”

Becoming The Independent‘s Chief Art Critic in 1986, he looks back fondly at a moment in the late eighties when The Independent seemed to challenge the Fleet Street status quo. “At the Indy, before I came, it was a quarter of a page for an art review. We started doing two whole pages, three thousand words on Rembrandt. Lots of papers at the time never even had regular art critics. They had reviewers for theatre and classical concerts, but not for art. All of that has really changed. Now The Sunday Times has double page spreads on exhibitions.”

He considers that “All of that has made a big difference. It has changed things. That’s good, I wanted to change it.” Here, I begin to see beneath the even, urbane manner of Graham-Dixon, to the steely determination which has propelled his desire to bring art down from the pedestal.

Graham-Dixon was on the Turner Prize panel in 1991, the year Anish Kapoor won, and just as the Young British Artists were emerging into the public consciousness.
“Norman Rosenthal and I were on the Turner Prize committee. We wanted Michael Landy, but he wasn’t even on the shortlist. But Nicholas Serota was on the committee and his was the deciding vote, and he had bought a large collection of Anish Kapoor, so I said this looks like he’d won it from the start. As a sop to us, they changed the age rule, so that only artists under 40 could win.”

“When the Turner Prize began there was a massive prejudice against contemporary art in the media—this false outrage over art being shit, was alleviated by the Turner, it became such an annual bore for the press to attack the Turner that they became sick of their own outrage. So it worked, in a way.”

Yet he sees this as part of a wider issue within contemporary art. “The problem is saying art must be avant garde, which is bullshit—if art is only powerful if it shocks you.”

“[Karlheinz] Stockhausen called 9/11 the ultimate visual spectacle, committed on TV [‘the biggest work of art there has ever been’]. Isis speak the language of shock, the language of the avant garde. How can an artist compete? Art has lost the power the provoke.”

When I ask him about the state of contemporary British art, he points to Gillian Wearing.

“The problem now is knowing who the good ones are. What’s astonishing is how every museum collection is so uniform—if one gets an Anish Kapoor, everyone has to have one. In the past, such works went to the basement quicker, but who wants to put £200m in the basement? Who would be brave enough to do that?”

In a way, it is not surprising that Graham-Dixon has spent the last decade focusing instead on the art of the past. It seems certain that his television work will be his lasting contribution to art history, despite his impressive 2010 book Caravaggio—A Life Sacred and Profane (and he is working on a biography of Vermeer). Keeping to a similar format with each of his BBC4 documentaries, Graham-Dixon’s The Art of… has notched up eleven distinct series, each tackling a different nation.

“The objective over twenty years,” he explains, “has been to choose as many different cultures as possible over three episodes.” From Germany to China and back to Scandinavia, he has always refused to tell the easy stories about humanity’s artistic past.

Indeed, when it came to making this year’s The Art of France, he laments that “it was delayed because BBC4 thought it would be too familiar.”

Graham-Dixon is certainly unsparing when it comes to the national broadcaster’s failings. “The BBC is rich as hell,” stressing “it’s not about funding cuts but funding choices. One episode of Match of the Day has the same budget as ten of my series.” He admits to finding the BBC having “lost its way”, too dedicated to spending on large-budget costume dramas than educating and informing the British public.

Graham-Dixon is keen to point out that it is hardly a problem with audiences –“The Art of Spain was on BBC World and sixty-eight million people watched it!” he says with justifiable pride – but with the BBC’s priorities. “At the moment for the BBC it is about the big audiences, which I don’t think is what public service broadcasting should be about.”

Yet this pessimism has not infected his work – he is keen to tackle the art of India and Latin America next, bringing fresh art historical narratives to the screen. Graham-Dixon ruminates that “part of the subtext of my programmes is that nationality is a powerful fiction,” pointing to the crossover in European cultures shown by his programmes on Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries. “Nations have been constructed. By doing the whole world, the overall message is anti-nationalistic despite paradoxically being a history of nations,” threading an internationalist undertone to his work, leaving it there for an audience to find.

I ask him how he closes the gap between art and an audience wary of museums and galleries. “I don’t know, [I try] bridging the gap between art history and museum, to tell people it’s alright to be interested in art. I don’t want to sound condescending, but I’m trying to set an example about it being okay to like art, to be enthusiastic about art.” With that deceptively humble mission, Andrew Graham-Dixon hurtles towards another corner of the world, to bring it to us.

‘Random’ preview – “Convincing and jarring”

Izzy Smith
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‘Random’ preview – “Convincing and jarring”

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’ ability to completely transport me into the world of Random, even without the magical context of a theatre, speaks to her impressive talent as an actress. At a hurriedly arranged preview of the play’s first act at the Okinaga Room of Wadham College, I saw her embody multiple characters with consummate skill. Her accents, tones of voice and facial expressions shift masterfully, with each character clearly recognisable, even as their emotional states shift dramatically. What is perhaps most convincing is her use of physicality, her bearing and stature morphing impressively, truly embodying the characters, from the hunched careworn mother to the confidently upright father, and the son’s careless, loose-limbed ceaseless movement.

Speaking after her performance, Amewudah-Rivers tells me how her and director John Livesey had discussed in detail the importance of “spotlighting each of these characters, showing how they all link but are all individuals.” This focus certainly came through in the performance, with the closeness of the family permeating throughout, palpable even in the tensions between them. The mother resents how her children take her for granted, feeling like “their keeper” as she clears away their breakfast plates, but then softens as she states that actually she is doing this “like their mother.” Amewudah-Rivers also discusses how being, as a black woman, the only actor on stage, “centralises the themes of gender and race,” with Livesey agreeing that it enhances this ongoing examination of “the role of the woman within the family,” and the burdens placed upon her.

The intimacy of this family of developed characters, built through, as Amewudah-Rivers says, “Finding the truth and the honesty behind all of them,” and who all come together within this one actress, makes the later intrusion of the police into their home deeply jarring. Present within the play only in the family’s reactions, they are a sinister gap in the dialogue, and Amewudah-Rivers, as each family member, moves around their imagined figures with caution. The family’s fear and distrust for them is striking and infectious, and I as the only audience member recoil from writer Debbie Tucker Green’s very physical descriptions of them traipsing uninvited over the mother’s best carpet in their “outside shoes.”

As Amewudah-Rivers comments, “There’s a lot of emphasis on ‘them’ versus ‘us’,” and Livesey adds that “what we hope to capture with our staging is this sense that the police, who we should feel protected by, feel like this intrusion,” and “so often institutions can feel they are at a disjunct from communities and families, especially from ethno-religious communities.” Amewudah-Rivers’ deft shifting of intensity, and portrayal of true fear, resentment and anger, really drive home the emotional implications of this, making the most of the musicality of the script through angry crescendos and poignant, frightened moments of quiet.

This poetic or music quality is a particular focus of Livesey’s, and he reflects on how, “finding the different rhythms, the different beats, the different energies for the characters, finding their music, and then letting Fran sing it, was a great process for me.” The play is also poetic in how short phrases can be laden with meaning, and Amewudah-Rivers gives these lines space to work on the audience. She allows a significant lull in the mother’s hectic industry as she notes wistfully, and with an odd nostalgia: “still I catch a shiver of a shadow of a shadow of a day.” She delivers with slow sickening force a line observing how the police take out a “clear plastic bag of a conversation stopper.”

Throughout the play we see repetitions of phrases or moments from different perspectives, like a form of refrain, but each time radically altered by the context and tone. Both the mother and daughter comment on the father’s quietness in similar terms, but the daughter seems affectionately impressed, the mother somewhat defeated. This repetition is at work even in what seem at first more quotidian moments of the play. Characters repeatedly state the time of day, the significant of which becomes painfully clear as it culminates in the police stating the time of the play’s central incident. Amewudah-Rivers is able to use these poetic qualities of repetition and rhythm to enhance the emotional impact of her performance, where with a lesser actor they may damage the play’s believability.

Both Amewudah-Rivers and Livesey hope to see their production of Random have an ongoing impact after the performance. Livesey tells me, “we’re really hoping this play doesn’t just rest on its laurels, we are really trying to raise awareness.” The production team will be collecting and raising awareness for the Damilola Taylor Trust, which Livesey tells me “is about trying to create more aspirational opportunities for kids.” As Amewudah-Rivers points out, Oxford “experiences these same kinds of problems, these same kinds of disjuncts” as we are shown in the lack of understanding between the family and police. She hopes that, “by seeing this play, whether they’re current students or prospective students, people can see that they’re represented by a stage in Oxford.” In pursuing this goal of greater representation, she has also set up the BAME Drama Society, which she describes as “a safe space for any BME students to just share and explore and create, and voice our own stories and our own narratives through theatre.”

They both hope that, rather than feeling comfortably virtuous for attending the play, audiences – and, as Livesey notes, “particularly white audiences” – will recognise that “you could still be doing more, you should still be thinking about these questions for you.” As Amewudah-Rivers adds, “everyone has implicit bias, and everyone needs to check themselves.” Whether they leave with this sense of responsibility will be up to audiences of the whole play to decide, but I certainly believe that Amewudah-Rivers’ subtle and convincing performance makes empathy for the characters and their struggles unavoidable.

Random runs at the Oxford Playhouse from 31 October-4 November. Tickets are available here.

Five minutes with Markus Beeken, Light Entertainment Society’s Community Officer

Cherwell Stage
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Five minutes with Markus Beeken, Light Entertainment Society’s Community Officer

Can you tell us a bit about OULES and your role there?
OULES is the Oxford University Light Entertainment Society. We’re basically the more casual approach to drama, everyone who auditions gets a part and we write all our own shows. I’m the Homes and Schools Officer, which basically means I deal with promoting OULES in the community, organising taking shows to Care Homes and local schools to raise money for charity.

How did you get involved with drama at Oxford?
I started by assistant producing a garden play during my College’s arts week in first year, having never got involved in any drama back home. From there it was just a case of saying yes to anything that came my way and trying my hand at new things.

What is your favourite play?
That’s a big question! I’m writing on theatre for my dissertation and the play that’s interesting me the most at the moment is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee. It’s so claustrophobic and threatening, it’s hard not to get sucked in.

How would you want to stage it at Oxford?
As I said, it’s a very narrow and suffocating play, so I feel like put- ting it on with minimal staging in something like the Burton Taylor Studio would highlight that sense of entrapment. It wouldn’t be a comfortable performance but it would be effective.

What is your happiest memory of Oxford drama?
Probably the feeling I got when I decided to pursue my long-time dream of directing The Winter’s Tale. It’s always been a passion project of mine and seeing it all coming together has been an honour. More than this though, the outpouring of support from my friends has been kind of overwhelming.

Have you ever had a production go really wrong?
My first experience as a stage manager I forgot to put an integral prop on the stage and only realised about ten seconds before it was needed. I’ve never seen a group of people running so fast in my life!

What advice would you give for freshers who wanna do the dramz?
Firstly never, ever call it ‘dramz’ but I think it’s a case of remember- ing that whatever you want to do, there’s probably other people out there who would be willing to do it with you so go for it. I’ve always treated drama as a social exercise, not something to be taken too seriously. So join the Light Entertainment Society, make some friends and then keep trying out new things.

Have you got any exciting projects that you’re working on at the minute?
I’m currently directing a hyper-modern production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Maths Institute which will be on in November. It’s a really exciting project, especially pulling such a strange play into the modern era. The event is floating around Facebook, look us up! It’s going to be great.

The toughest job in college football

The Secret College Footballer
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The toughest job in college football

Football is a game consisting of two teams of eleven, but there is one person on the pitch that this description does not account for. The man in the middle, the thin black line between order and chaos, the most influential figure on the pitch – the referee. In the lightning-paced world of college football, where captains can forget to pay refs’ fees and refs themselves can forget to turn up, sometimes the responsibility lands in your lap, and you’d better be ready when it does.

Although squad rotation means that they’re not likely to ref more than a half per game, taking the black can present certain challenges for college footballers. Brought up on a diet of blood, sweat and tears, needing to adopt an unpassionate approach to a match is an extremely big ask for players, especially if they are asked to ref straight after being subbed off. Even the most mentally flexible players struggle to rise above the situation at the flick of a switch. While no respectable ambassador of the sport would officiate with deliberate bias, it is not easy to stifle the celebrations when their would-be teammates score, nor to forget that they’re no longer marking a particular opponent and clear them out in a 50/50. Critics might accuse these players of indiscipline, but it is important to remember that being a referee is temporary; being a custodian of college pride is a lifetime responsibility. You can never blow the final whistle on your college.

This is a fact that many of the refs’ would-be teammates tend to forget. When college footballers think with their hearts as well as their heads, as they are wont to do, their teammate-cum-ref is lost to them. Where once they saw a comrade in arms they now see only a malevolent watch and whistle. Flashes of vitriol may be directed the ref’s way, especially if the match if finely poised, or worse, turning against their would-be team. However, their true nature as a fellow player affords the ref patience in these situations, and all is forgotten once the prodigal son returns to the fold at the end of the half. Alternatively, other players might always see the refas a teammate, to the point where they sometimes attempt to pass to them. To avoid such situations, some kind of distinctive clothing is advised. Past options have included but are not limited to a bib, a coat, and a scholar’s gown.

Of course, challenges from former teammates are not the only ones that a hastily appointed referee has to face in a game. There is also the physical challenge. Imagine spending 70 minutes marauding up and down the left flank, running yourself into the ground for your team. Then, when you are eventually subbed off for a well-deserved rest, you find that you never even make it to the touchline. Instead, you’re made to swap shirts with the previous ref and keep up with the game for another 20 minutes. It’s a thankless task, but someone has to do it, you might well tell yourself as you struggle to mask your exhaustion. But why, you may add, does that someone have to be you?

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