Sunday 7th September 2025

Culture

Night School: Oxford’s after-hours curriculum

The first time I saw Nahom and Ethan, it wasn’t on a night out – it was an early morning. I was shuffling through the half-awake crowd when my...

‘Delusions and Grandeur’ at the Fringe

★★★⯪☆ If there is one word to describe Karen Hall’s Delusions and Grandeur, it is...

The Oxford Revue at the Fringe

★★★⯪☆ Returning for their 62nd annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe, the Oxford Revue rolled...

Academia is hell, literally: R.F. Kuang’s ‘Katabasis’

R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis touches on a range of near-universal academic experiences: impostor syndrome; frantic,...

Freedom of Speech: where are the boundaries?

'Write whatever you like', many people say. It's not that simple...

Watching ourselves

Alice Salvage looks at why people go to the theatre, and what its future is likely to be

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

A show from the Oxford Imps based on audience suggestions and home-brewed sound effects is audacious-and brilliant

S1l3nce

Our reviewer won't give too much away about this Derren Brownish magic show-except that it left her amazed.

The Truth

Four stars for this Discworld production, the latest in an Oxford tradition

Renegade

The latest offering from the Oxford Revue

The Ideas Man by Shed Simove

A book by the inventor of 'Clitoris Allsorts' fails to titillate or raise titters

Raphaël Zarka – Geometry Improved

We find French 'found forms' fail fundementally

The Class

Rees Arnott-Davies finds Palme d'Or winning French drama a lesson in expert film-making

Buried Child

Sam Shepard's pretentious, flawed play gets better acting than it deserves

Confusions

Dialogue isn't the only thing that's funny about this Aykbourn play

All the World’s a Stage: Shakespeare improved

How Shakespeare's admirers thought his work needed a few rewrites

The Recruiting Officer

This eighteenth-century play is entertaining, but the depth of characterisation got lost in the space of the Oxford Playhouse

A Clockwork Orange

Good acting in the central role can't redeem a confused adaption of Anthony Burgess's novel

Napoleon, complex?

Michael Docherty find The Shadow of Enlightenment's exciting style cannot mask its dull substance.

Viva Glasvegas!

Joseph Weir heads to the O2 Academy to talk to Glasvegas at this year's NME Tour

See no evil, hear no evil

Three Monkeys, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's most recent cinematic venture, is imbued with a mesmeric brilliance from start to finish.

American prospects?

Mark Greif, co-editor of cutting-edge literary journal n+1, talks about diverging intellectual spheres and the role of the intellectual in today's society

Anyone for T?

William Kelleher talks to Toddla T at Fuse Night

4.48 Psychosis

An Expressionist take on Sarah Kane's last play misses the point

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