Georgina shot to Oxford thespy fame after finally singing a song that everyone knew in last term’s A Little Night Music. But it wasn’t just ‘Send in the Clowns’ that earned her widespread plaudits; her magnetic and assured presence made her the centre of attention on the Playhouse stage.

In her first term, Georgina provided welcome female punctuation in the oppressively male world of POSH, and went on throughout the year to perform in the acclaimed production of Closer (A Really Good Play about Sex) and the OUDS national tour, Machinal. 

Georgina trained on a RADA foundation course, which makes her superiority to the usual flailing student actor less surprising. This term, she’s playing the angel in Angels in America. This sounds like a pretty big deal. She’ll be the first student actor to be dangled from a wire above the Playhouse stage – so let’s hope the person holding the other end knows what they’re doing.

Much as we all love Park End unconditionally, and would prioritise a night there over our finals exams, nan’s funeral, or indeed the coming of the apocalypse, at some point in every Oxford student’s life comes the realisation that the Cheese Floor really isn’t the be-all-and-end-all and that Gangnam Style is actually a really bloody annoying song. For that time (which we all hope comes to you as soon as possible), there is Burning Down The House.

Burning Down The House, the brainchild of a few students from Somerville College, is the triumphant revival in Oxford of an 80s club night, and promises to offer something not to be found in any of Oxford’s more familiar night clubs. This is no Bridge Thursday. As if the Talking Heads-inspired name wasn’t reason enough to be excited, BDTH’s Facebook page promises classics from The Smiths, The Cure and Madness among many other welcome names. Add to that free 80s’ sweets, and a requests-open DJ, and it seems to us that Wednesday of 1^st Week can’t come soon enough. Co-organizer Olivia Arigho Stiles spoke about the night, saying “Everyone should be hugely excited about the return of an 80s night to the Oxford clubbing scene. Expect classic 80s with a few obscure gems thrown in as well. Mullet optional”.

The organizers have also come up with the excellent idea of a Spotify playlist the morning after of everything that was played on the night, so that even for those who love the sudden moment of clarity two days later as they turn to a friend and exclaim “They played ‘Don’t You Want Me’!”, the days of trying to figure out what that song that you inexplicably have in your head are over – at least as far as Burning Down The House is concerned.

Maybe this night won’t lure everyone away from Park End, and maybe (shock horror) there are those who don’t look on the 80s with fondness, but in my opinion, you should get working on that mullet.

Next week, Oxford music students take to the stage in a performance of a newly written opera based on Margaret Atwood’s hit novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Chris Garrard, music postgraduate and the composer of the piece, explains what this project is all about.

Who is involved in the opera?
For the most part it will be performed by music undergraduates taking a module in Opera and Music Theatre. However, there are other people helping out in other ways, so it is a very much a production in its own right too! It is also being directed by highly acclaimed soprano and director Lore Lixenberg.

Can audiences expect a literal retelling of The Handmaid’s Tale story?
The book jumps between different places and points in time and so it takes some time to piece the story together as you read it. Performing it word for word would take a long time. This production will be a version of the original story, trying to stay true to the spirit and essence of Margaret Atwood’s text. That said, music and theatre have a unique way of getting under the skin of a story and exploring a dimension we might not have engaged with before.

This piece is being devised in the two weeks running up to the performances. How has this influenced your composing?
I have had ideas for the piece for some time but I wanted to allow space for new ideas and approaches. With that in mind, I have composed different kinds of material. Some pieces are more extended and fixed while others are more flexible and improvisatory. The result is a general structure and shape but with plenty of room for reinterpretation by the director and
performers.

Two weeks isn’t long to create and rehearse an entire opera. Will it be ready in time?
Nearly all performances in previous Opera & Music Theatre courses have been put together in a short space of time. It is very ambitious and strenuous to work on this kind of timescale, but it does have several advantages. The cast and those involved have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the production, to live and breathe it for a week or two (although that maysound like a cliché!) The result can be a more raw and direct performance.

Who have been your main influences in the
composition of this opera?
I find it hard to focus myself on any one way of working or doing things. At times, Samuel Beckett’s plays were on my mind and at other times, some of Philip Glass’s music. There are a whole host of flavours from minimalist music, performance art, avant-garde theatre, folk music and electronic music that have been floating around my head. I have seen performances which Lore, our director, has put on before. Her style and approach has also been in the back of my mind when working on material.

Who do you think will appreciate this production
and why?
My hope is that anyone can appreciate this production or find something in it that speaks to them. There might be aspects that are familiar or reassuring,
and parts which are new or unsettling. Those that know Atwood’s book, who enjoy a powerful story or appreciate different flavours of music and theatre will hopefully appreciate this production.

The Handmaid’s Tale is being performed at the
Jacqueline du Pré Music Building on 18th – 19th
January.
Ticket enquiries: [email protected].

Animals, Small and Furry
Bunny, by the writer of Skins and set in Luton, runs at the Burton Taylor in 5th
week, while Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, written by Tennessee Williams and set in Mississippi, appears in 6th week in LMH.

Colours, Primary
They Will Be Red and Blue Beard both appear in 2nd week in the Burton Taylor. With a bit of imagination, convince yourself that the colour green is represented by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, running at Keble in 7th week

Kin-Killing and Athlete’s Foot
Happily, neither of this term’s Greek tragedies runs in 5th week. Antigone
gets staged at Keble and Philoctetes at Corpus, both in 6th week.

New Writing
The Burton Taylor, famous for new writing, matches these expectations this
term: virtually every week it will play host to something newly written. The
pick of the bunch will be OUDS’s New Writing Festival in 7th week, where
there’s some guarantee of quality: four shows out of 29 entries selected by Anya Reiss, a young British playwright.

Philosophy, Disney-Style
A Theory of Justice: The Musical running in 3rd week, in Keble, sees John Rawls travel back in time. See the article on the left.

Prepositions 
“In” features heavily this term; Angels in America, at the Playhouse in 2nd Week; Marx in Soho, at the Burton Taylor in 4th; and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, at the Burton Taylor in 6th, will all star this much-beloved monosyllable.

Revenge
The Oxford Revue take theirs in 8th week in the Burton Taylor.

Serious Shakespearian Actors
Bill is unearthed again for The Merchant of Venice in 7th week at Corpus, and gets parodied by the Imps at the Burton Taylor the week before.

Tragedy
See New Writing, and Kin-Killing.

Zazzy
Cherwell Stage this term.

Let’s make A Theory of Justice the musical.” “You know what, that would be a fantastic revision method!” It was with flippant comments like these, made during the run-up to PPE prelims, that A Theory of Justice: The Musical was born. A similar process gave Oxford The Aeneid: The Musical in 2007. Evidently, examinations are good for the creative spirit.

About a year later the writers, Eylon Aslan-Levy, Tommy Peto and Ramin Sabi, the last poised over a piano, sat down again. “We started bouncing back a couple of ideas for the plot, humming a couple of tunes, and then we realised that we had a cracking Broadway classic on our hands,” said Aslan-Levy.

The musical will see John Rawls, the twentieth century American philosopher, travel through time to draw inspiration for his magnum opus. He talks, or rather sings and dances, with a selection of other philosophers. All
the while Rawls tries to get the girl, Fairness, and defeat the villain, Robert Nozick, another twentieth century American philosopher.

The mention of a girl and a villain might make you think this will be like every other musical you have ever seen. That’s because it pretty much is. “The relationships are very much based on traditional Broadway, Disney-style musicals…we satirise all of those tropes,” Sabi explained. “It’s almost, but not quite, a parody of Broadway musicals,” said Peto.

“We’re also mocking the time travel genre,” Sabi said. He talked of “some inexplicable reason” why Rawls was able—and willing—to travel back through time. “But Ramin, it is explained! There’s a time vortex!” cried Aslan-Levy. In actual fact there’s an explanatory song too (demonstrated during this interview). Sabi had clearly missed one of the writing sessions. The show is not primarily an exposition of political philosophy. In fact, the closest they
come to this is in taking the mick out of Rawls’ famously tedious style of writing. Although we don’t all share the toils of being a PPE student, this is surely one philosophy in-joke that every student here will appreciate.

Not that Aslan-Levy, Peto and Sabi have written the musical with merely an Oxford audience in mind: they insist that “it would work just as well staged here or on the other side of the globe.”

As for the songs, there are “show tunes, Disney-style”, a cabaret-esque song, a rock anthem, and a barbershop quartet. Hobbes and Locke get a duet – “We knew from very early on we wanted them to have a rap battle,” Aslan-Levy explained. “Immanuel Kant has a Mariah Carey-type power ballad,” he continued. Kant will also be in drag, for which, alone, it might be worth seeing the show.

A Theory of Justice: The Musical will run in 3rd week, Wednesday to Saturday, at the Keble O’Reilly.

Predictably, David Attenborough’s new series Africa is utterly great. Better than great. This first episode is about the Kalahari desert and its inhabitants, and the four years of research and filming has produced some truly amazing sequences. 

Although there’s nothing which compares with the spectacular footage, Attenborough’s magic is, as ever, found in the storytelling of his voiceovers – the way each sequence becomes a little tale somehow relatable and endearing. There’s just something irresistible about Attenborough’s gentle narration of his animal fables, particularly with this series’ music choices (casting two giraffes in a spaghetti western standoff was a stroke of bizarre genius). More convincingly than ever, Africa gives an unnervingly human quality to its subjects, and endows them with reactions and emotions that are somehow utterly plausible. Suddenly meerkats can be disgruntled. Leopards lethargic. Rhinos flirtatious. Giraffes arrogant. Giant horrible black wasps, well, even Grandpa Attenborough can’t redeem them. But they are very good at digging.

The show delivers a medley of anthropomorphic mini-dramas, and the audience, as ever, has to make big choices about who to root for in the animal-offs which form the backbone of the show: do you plump for Plucky Teen Leopard? Or Cute Baby Deer? Do you take the (pseudo-)moral high ground and root for the weak or the cute? Or have you given in to your Colosseum instinct, sitting on the edge of your sofa baying for blood? 

This episode saw a new narrative emerge, and with its innovation came a new, teen-movie style dilemma: the Rhino love triangle. Do you back beefcake Channing-Tatum-Rhino, or the scrawny one with a ‘kooky’ sense of humour, arriving to compete for the girl amusingly dressed as an antelope? After the female lead is successfully wooed by the horned Michael Cera, there is an unfortunate sexual failure: the voiceover lilts, “a girl can only put up with so much” as she feigns sleep to avoid the awkward situation.

Attenborough’s animal fables present moral dilemmas we have grown up with: you vaguely feel that the predator is the baddie, but maturely accept the odd death of prey as necessary to survival/Circle of Life/something to do with biomass – he never really gets into the science of it all. However, this episode reveals the single most horrible and unambiguous baddie in Attenborough history: the armoured ground cricket. If it’s not enough that it is hideous, armoured and disturbingly giant, as well as squirting its own blood as a weapon, there is always the fact that it is grimly intent on eating (bird) babies and feasting cannibalistically on the not yet-dead bodies of its own comrades-in-horridness. Cheers all around as the baby birds survive the attack.

We also know exactly who we’re rooting for in this episode’s giraffe-battle. We’re backing the old bull and David knows it: ‘Is this the end of his reign?’ Not even close, if this episode is any thing to judge by.

The cameo is a tricky thing indeed. Do it well and you can steal the whole show, but anything less than perfect and that’s all anyone can remember about the film. (Holly Valance at the end of Taken. Unforgivable.) It seems the cameo has become something of an art form in the world of the silver screen. No longer just a novelty tool for the producers of floundering comedies, or a directorial trademark of Hitchcock, it has become big business, with many an old-timer qualifying to list ‘Cameo Actor’ as their primary occupation. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cameo industry is the main source of funding for David Hasselhoff’s tanning sessions.

Over time the role has developed  and showcased its own variety. We have director cameos, comedic cameos and downright bizarre cameos, each category deserving to stand alone in any awards ceremony. In terms of actor cameos, good performances have been known to revive careers, boost popularity, and, in the case of Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love, even bag an Oscar. Equally, the weirdest of performances are at worst a chance for some publicity, so it’s really no wonder that anyone who is anyone (or anyone who is no one for that matter) is keen on securing themselves an appearance.

However, it’s not all about the media attention. Director appearances are a far more subtle art, and are definitely a nerdy niche in the film world. Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorcese and Peter Jackson are all cameo fans, the latter appearing in his  Lord of the Rings trilogy and, somewhat strangely, as the stabby Santa in Hot Fuzz. A man of many talents. It’s no coincidence, however, that these directors in particular happen to be some of the biggest fanboys in the industry, each producing their own brand of geekery in their films.

Fundamentally, the cameo is a geeky thing: it allows the directors to play out their fantasies by popping up in their own creations, and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it style separates your average fan from the  completely (ever so slightly worryingly) devoted. I for one reward myself with a sugary treat and a smug glow every time I spot Alfred Hitchcock lurking in one of his films. The trivia section of IMDB helps. Hitchcock is probably the master of director cameos, appearing in 37 of his 53 films in both speaking and non-speaking parts. His appearances capture the science behind the cameo. It is both a nod to the audience and a subtle act of self-promotion. Just as Chaucer creates a character for himself in his works, so Hitchcock does in his films: each glimpse of him on screen creates an overall portrait of him as well as a claim of ownership.

But, poncey film buffery aside, the best bit of a cameo appearance is when it makes you chuckle, and when you get the idea that the actor, or figure involved, is having a laugh too.  Be it the famed news team standoff in  Anchorman (Tim Robbins – who knew?!) to Keith Richards simply playing a woozier version of himself in Pirates of the Caribbean, there are some truly bizarre guest turns. Most entertaining is when an actor is taken out of context – Orson Welles’ appearance on  The Muppets, for example, will be eternally baffling. Evidently, the comic potential of cameo appearances is huge, but the beautiful irony of my all-time favourite cameo inspires more than a few giggles. Charlie Sheen’s brief appearance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off sees him as a charming bad boy; a loveable rogue, if you will. A loveable rogue who happens to be sitting in a police station completely stoned. So, there you have it. Cameos can make us laugh, turn us into super nerdy reference spotters, and apparently, even predict the future.