Modern Oxford was created by poets and novelists. Sure, the University can do its best with videos showing students in jeans and t-shirts, and we can point all we want to research groups winning Nobel prizes. But to the popular imagination, none of that is Oxford. For the public, Oxford is still the city of undergraduates wasting away their time, reciting poetry, drinking heavily, and dressed up at hall while they settle the grand issues of the day. This is the incubator of the great poets and politicians of the future. And perhaps no group of individuals epitomised this more than the Auden Set.

Admittedly, the Auden Set is not a true set. Its members (W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice) only had three things in common—poetry, Oxford, and left-wing politics. As undergraduates, only Auden and Day-Lewis could have honestly been described as close friends. It was only later, when journalists began to notice the similarities in the trajectories of their lives, that the set was born.

Journalists would later try to imagine that they had other things in common—Auden and Spender’s homosexuality made people question the sexuality of heterosexual Day-Lewis and MacNeice, and some even began to view it as a communist undergraduate cabal. Yet even so, the fact is that four of the greatest poets of the English language in the 20th century all attended our university at the same time as undergraduates.

Auden and Day-Lewis worked together for poetry collections, learning from each other and teaching each other the skills of their art. Day-Lewis, who studied English at Wadham, was instrumental in making Auden, who was at Christ Church, move from a degree in zoology to one in English literature. As undergraduates, Auden and Day-Lewis collaborated in a poetry collection, unimaginatively titled Oxford Poetry. After their undergraduate years, Auden and Day-Lewis went their separate ways, but each still continued to influence each other.

There is a reason why the set of poets is most commonly known as the Auden Set. For although Day-Lewis, Spender, and MacNeice all have their merits, none of them reaches the heights of Auden. Indeed, much of the worst poetry written by the others was written in imitation of Auden’s clipped, political style.

Take Day-Lewis, the man who turned Auden into a poet. His poems suffered for years in imitation of Auden’s style: it is only upon becoming a traditional poet, who eschewed modern poetry for traditional lyricism, such as in his collection Word Over All, that he truly realised his own unique potential.

Auden and Day-Lewis’ relationship shows both the benefits and perils of collaboration. As undergraduates Day-Lewis helped Auden, but later, when master became teacher, his poetry suffered, and only recovered when he stopped collaborating and became independent.

How did insanely popular TV quiz show Pointless celebrate its 100th episode? Not with fireworks. Not with champagne. No. Instead they marked the milestone by having co-hosts Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman switch roles, realising the somewhat gimmicky idea of role-swapping held something weirdly fascinating for an audience. Indeed, they were merely employing a long-used theatrical technique of stage collaboration. Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco alternated Richard II and Bolingbroke in 1973, and Gielgud and Olivier shared Mercutio and Romeo back in 1935.

The technique, however, was still relatively rare, even in theatre, until the last few years. In Robert Icke’s production of Mary Stuart at London’s Almeida Theatre last winter, the two lead actresses, Lia Williams and Juliet Stevenson, began each performance with the spin of a coin which decided which of them would play Mary, and which her cousin Elizabeth. Williams is used to this: she starred alongside Kristin Scott-Thomas in Old Times on Broadway in 2013, swapping roles once a week.

The RSC’s Dr Faustus last year started with the two leads simultaneously lighting matches—whoever’s burnt out first played the doomed doctor, the other played Mephistopheles. Most famously, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller become both the creator and the created in Nick Dear’s 2011 production of Frankenstein. It’s even happened in Oxford, when, only a couple of years ago, two students alternated the roles of Orlando and Elizabeth I in an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel.

Although the technique itself has always been greeted with interest by critics and audience members alike, there must be some reason behind its growing popularity: a reason not specific to each one of these directorial decisions, but to the concept as a whole. Perhaps it is partly due to a desire on the part of theatre practitioners to differentiate their medium from other art forms, especially in an age of easily available drama via Netflix, Amazon Prime and iPlayer.

The casting emphasises the high-stakes nature of live theatrical performance. With two people each having learnt two parts, each part hundreds of lines long, the potential for failure doubles. What if they forget their lines? Say the wrong part? Start performing the wrong role? And of course, there’s the behind-the-scenes possibility for inter-actor rivalry. Just think of the brilliant That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which two arrogant actors determined to steal the spotlight become increasingly violent whilst sharing the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Theatre takes place over such a long time that relationships can develop and disintegrate—and there’s no way of editing out any expression of underlying tensions.

The chance of seeing two different interpretations of exactly the same role on two different nights also highlights a key selling point of live theatre: that each performance is a totally unique event. Like much metatheatres, the technique does not necessarily create something entirely new. It rather emphasises the already present, unique assets of theatre as an art form.

Perhaps there is something further, though, to this particular theatrical technique, linking even to other art forms—like the body swap movie. Yep, that’s right, I’m going to attempt to connect Gielgud and Olivier’s performances in Romeo and Juliet to Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday. A feat I doubt has been attempted thus far, but there’s a first time for everything. Hear me out.

In body-swap movies like 17 Again and It’s a Boy-Girl Thing, the swappees start the film hating both each other and their own lives, and finish by understanding the other and appreciating what they have. Role-alternating allows for that same sweet-spot of both empathy and distance.

In the past few years, we have seen an increasing amount of left-wing activism, mostly revolving around identity politics, which uses empathy as a key part of its argument. Being offended is now a reason to protest (against Germaine Greer for example, or even the Cecil Rhodes statue). If only we could walk in someone else’s shoes, we could understand them and perhaps agree with them. This aligns with a belief in nurture over nature: that problems and personality are predominantly created by society and therefore are societal constructs rather than innate characteristics.

Role-swapping in theatre, particularly the kind of role-swapping based on chance, as in Mary Stuart or Dr Faustus, promotes this belief. It promotes empathy above all, but shows how easy it is to be blind to the underlying similarities between us and other people. This, I believe, is why the technique is growing in popularity—and why, with the backlash against Trump’s seeming lack of empathy, I think Mary Stuart will by no means be the last time we see this technique on the stage in England.