Student drama isn’t worth my time or my money

I’ve been to some plays in Oxford, and they’ve generally been pretty rubbish.

Now before I begin I will admit that any amateur production produced over five weeks shoehorned into a busy working term performed by a bunch of hungover undergrads on a low budget isn’t exactly going to match up to Cumberbatch and Lee Miller in Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein at the National, and I’m not expecting it to. I’m just saying that for a fiver (minimum) I expect a certain level of service that I just don’t think the Oxford drama scene provides.

For five pounds I could buy a pint of lager beer and some delicious nuts, which I know before consuming I will enjoy and also know won’t surprise me with on stage nudity or someone fucking their lines up.

Equally, I could buy just under a month’s worth of Netflix, a service so bloody full of content I couldn’t watch it all in that time, and a service that, importantly, I can switch off when it gets boring.

The dreaming spires are full of shit

And it’s not that I’m some kind of philistine either, I do culture. I know my Tate Modern from my Tim Minchin, and will happily pay good money for something I think is deserving, so don’t go off on one about how I’m not appreciating the art.

My problem is that student drama is generally just fucking rubbish.

Great swathes of the student body work themselves up into a collective tizzy over what’s on this term at the bloody O’Reilly. We all dutifully march down to whichever college auditorium has been chosen, shell out and sit down for 90 minutes of self-indulgent bollocks delivered semi coherently by a bunch of students who really should be writing their essays. And the funny thing is, we do this more than once a term. We regularly spend on this shit, leaving each performance as underwhelmed as the one before.

Comments circulate among those puffing on their rollies during the interview about how “[friend of person speaking] was really good”, and how “the staging is really cool”, but deep down everyone’s thinking about what they’re doing later, or how they’re going to word their hollow compliments when the performance is over.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are diamonds in the rough. The Pillowman actually deserved the mass circle-jerk it caused within the student body, and there are small productions that shine at the BT and elsewhere, but they really are few and far between.

Pillowman: bearable

For most of term we all sit through play after play, shelling out our hard inherited VK funds repaying Brasenose Arts Fund for the money it really should have just donated somewhere it was needed.

But what do I advocate? I hear you ask.

I say down with plays, or in the real world, we could at least remove the morons who review them. The pages of OxStu and the Cherwell are full of woolly three to five star reviews, packed with terms like “all star cast” and ‘notable performance’, which serve only to justify the free ticket Theo Thesp was given in exchange for his 600 words of drivel.

The reviews perpetuate the mediocrity, allowing rubbish to be produced on a regular basis with no backlash. Yes, social fortunes are bought and sold in the auditions for the next Playhouse production, and those reviewing are undoubtedly friends with someone in the production, but everyone needs to just grow some balls and say what they think.

They actually get the rudeness bit right

For once I say look to the Union. They have no problem publically character assassinating one another, and neither should we. If someone produces shit, tell them, or we’ll be stuck forever in a world of three star Cherwell reviews, and that’s a place no one wants to be.