Halfway through last night’s performance of Hamlet, I ran out of superlatives to describe what I was watching. Yes, it’s exam term, and yes, my mind is shattered, but my loss of words stemmed instead from this example of student theatre at its very best.

The effort that had been put into this production was palpable even before the safety curtain rose to reveal a bare, grey Elsinore: the Cold War theme was firmly established by the faux-timeline of East and West Denmark, which was itself a work of genius. Tracing the characters from near the end of the Second World War, director Niall Wilson offered us some genuine insight into their personal histories.

The claim that “Denmark is a prison” was never more apt: the stark set, punctuated by the occasional chair, really hammered home the emptiness of the court at Elsinore, which was complimented by the subtle but effective lighting changes during scenes. Moreover, the staging of the action was exemplary: using the aisles and even the lighting box as scenes for the drama, moments like the appearance of the Ghost were made genuinely terrifying, with the audience never sure where to look, or what to expect. Sure, it made our necks ache for a minute at the most, but who cared?

The use of the curtain to divide the stage was also inspired; leaving Polonius on the audience’s side of the action was both original and allowed tension to be built by the past-faced dialogue between Hamlet and Gertrude. However, by far the most effective aspect of the set was the installation of the massive clock at the rear of the stage, counting down from two and a half hours; dominating the stage, it served as a constant reminder of the inevitable nature of the tragedy unfolding before us, and was well used at certain moments for effect. I won’t ruin the rest, but all hail to the ‘Clock King’, Tony Dent – it would have been even better had the countdown finished exactly with the action on stage, but this is a minor quibble at most.

A word on the change of gender: this was no ‘gimmick’, as Wilson himself informed us. It worked perfectly, and, at moments, it was utterly believable that this was how Hamlet had originally been written. Some lines were given new depth – Ophelia’s “Man delights not me”, whilst some were given more comedy – “Man, my lord?” The central relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet was beautifully portrayed, never more so in their heart-stopping, frenzied kiss. So this was no gimmick; no sir.

Onto the performances, which were all stellar to say the least, with a few of the cast holding our attention for the entire length of the play – no mean feat. Sarah Livingstone’s Hamlet was always believable, whether in fooling or soliloquy, and her Rocky-esque dancing during all the chaos was fantastic. She was totally compelling, and really breathed new life into speeches. Yes, there were a few fluffed lines, but, in such a massive role, I was nothing if not impressed.

Ed Eustace’s Claudius was well conveyed, coming into his own at the end of the first half: his movement from oozing creep towards genuine madness was captivating, if a little pantomime villain at points. The confusion of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was ably portrayed, while Hellie Cranney was superb as the hysterical Gertrude, given so little to work with. But for me, the star was truly Ellen Robertson’s Ophelia; from first entrance to her final mad farewell, she was wonderfully resigned.

There were a few niggles: the Ghost seemed slightly overplayed, though the idea was solid, while some speeches dragged slightly. But these are tiny comments in comparison to the success of the show. Superb acting, original and breath-taking direction, and well-implemented ideas: you would be genuinely mad to miss this.

The band, perhaps best known for their hit single Don’t Upset the Rhythm, have been described as one of the rowdiest acts on tour by Rolling Stone magazine.

The lead singer, commenting on the band’s reputation for colourful, bold performances said, “we always go that extra mile to give the crowd a night they’ll never forget”.

Joining the Noisettes on the main stage will the up-and-coming Duologue, fresh from an acclaimed SXSW festival.

The Guardian’s review from Texas informs Magdalene ticket holders they can expect “delicate songs despatched with effortless ease.”

Edinburgh Fringe award winners Henry Paker and Adam Riches have also been confirmed as part of the comedy lineup for the evening.

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Catch up on all the latest May Week gossip with The Tab’s May Ball Blog.

Indie rock band Spector will headline at this year’s Emmanuel College May Ball, The Tab can reveal.

The male five-piece band, formed in 2011, have London roots that will complement the event’s Last Call to London theme.

Sultry

After playing as a support act for Florence & the Machine in March 2012, Spector’s debut album, Enjoy It While It Lasts, reached number 12 in the UK Album charts later that year.

The band will be on familiar ground, having performed at Emma Ents in 2011. They also featured at Caius May Ball last year.

Known for their diversity of style, the band has been described as “somewhere between Roxy Music and the Strokes, the Killers and Kanye West, Pulp and Frank Sinatra.” Try making sense of that!

Joining Spector on June 16th will be singer-songwriter Gabrielle Aplin, who gained recognition last December on the soundtrack for the John Lewis Christmas TV advertisement.

Her album, English Rain, debuted at #2 this week.

We miss Christmas too

Emma May Ball Co-President Ella Raff, speaking exclusively to The Tab, said:

“We’re absolutely thrilled to see Spector return to Emma as our headline act for this year’s ball; we’re confident that the bespectacled Fred MacPherson’s [lead singer] dulcet tones will win over the crowds!

“We are also delighted to have secured one of the fastest-rising stars in British music, and are looking forward to a very special set from Gabrielle.”

Hey @fredmacpherson hey hey hi hi hi hey hi hey can’t wait to see you hey

— Emmanuel May Ball (@EmmanuelMayBall) May 22, 2013

The Emma Committee are evidently big MacPherson fans!

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Catch up on all the latest May Week gossip with The Tab’s May Ball Blog.

CamFM late breakfast presenter Daniel Edward is dropping a thousand ‘lucky pennies’ around Cambridge this exam term. 

After chancing upon a £10 note in the street recently, the second year Corpuscle has decided to share his good luck with as many fellow Cantabs as possible.

There are only a few Cambridge clubbing opportunities left in this academic year, and indeed EVER for finalists, so bitterness and self-pity are no doubt running high. We’re all going to miss those blissful nights of great music, lovely conversation and decorous behaviour, aren’t we?

I don’t even want to know what the theme for this swap was

This is certainly (camel) toeing the line of what is appropriate in public

Edgy people getting freaky in Fez – they must’ve lost their beanie hats earlier in the night

What can only be described as the slimiest game of Sardines in the smelliest place possible

Dirty dancing? Make sure to remember deodorant next time

Long time no D? If you’re tempted I’m sure these boys have plenty of the ‘ST’ variety after a dip in the Life pool

Girls getting off to impress boys (usually Blues or Pitt Club members)

Not sure this is what Mary Quant envisioned when she invented the mini skirt…

Well at least someone’s enjoying the show

Unsurprisingly, we were intrigued to see how Conrad’s canonical novella was to take to the stage. Or, more specifically, take to the stage in the form of a one man show.

It was certainly a bold move on behalf of Cambridge student George Johnston to adapt the book into a continuous monologue – but this is not your typical monologue showcase in the depths of Corpus Playroom. Arguably, it isn’t a one man show at all.

Guy Clark was nothing short of fantastic. Playing Marlow, the enigmatic sailor who narrates his experiences in the Congolese ivory trade, Clark refuses merely to relate the story – instead he brings all the characters to life. Displaying an impressive repertoire of accents (ranging from Belgian to an admirable Russian) and assuming multiple different roles, Clark never fell into the trap of a clichéd rallying back and forth when playing two disparate characters. Instead, he embodies all the roles fully, and we are never confused about who’s who. In a play so full of many little but crucial roles and voices, Clark manages to portray their individuality without subordinating his own overarching voice as narrator.

Inevitably, the lines with which he is presented are seriously weighty: Conrad is not known for light-hearted fiction. Telling the story of a voracious trade which perpetuates the atrocities of colonialism, Heart of Darkness is chilling – delving into the depths of a hitherto undiscovered land, we are also forced to recognise the unpalatable realities of the human psyche. It’s a text to be reckoned with, but this actor is not intimidated by the immensity of his task. Thank God he doesn’t simply reel off the lines. At no point do we feel like we’re at a reading of the novel; we are always seeing it in all the glory of its action.

The stage was bare but for three wooden crates and two maps of Africa adorning the white-washed walls. The manipulation of such a minimalistic stage was commendable, with the crates being used to form anything from a doctor’s examination bed to a toiling steamboat. The fluidity of the props’ movement was so natural that we almost didn’t notice their metamorphosis. The bare walls also meant that the coloured lighting could take full effect, and was suitably atmospheric. Unfortunately, at times the lighting seemed slightly artificial in the abrupt changes – we didn’t really benefit from the sudden change to blue as soon as the word ‘night’ was mentioned. Perhaps a subtler graduation would have been more in keeping with the general fluidity of the production.

However, this is a minor quibble. In an endeavour that is ambitious to say the least, the team behind Heart of Darkness really pulled it off, and gave the narrative a life beyond the page. Clark’s energy is boundless and engaging – we are utterly swept up in the story, a feat which is to be commended. If you’re looking for something a little different that will surprise you, look no further than this powerful production.

And among students who have never taken drugs before, that rate rises to one in four.

Bizarrely, as part of The Tab‘s nationwide drug survey, we asked students how many sexual partners they’d had.

The results show that, while Imperial and Cambridge were languishing around the bottom of the drug-taking table, they’re sitting pretty at the top of The Tab‘s no-sex-before-marriage league.

Leeds, on the other hand, is living up to its reputation as the nation’s biggest party uni. While its students took the drugs title, they’re bottom of the purity table. Ooh err!

But what about subject-based sex lives? Our survey shows the medics championing sexual health awareness at the top of the table.

Hot on their heels (but not in a lustful way, of course), are the classicists. Obviously it’s Artemis not Aphrodite who reigns supreme in their lecture theatres.

At the bottom end of the table, it’s the business students who are getting down to errr… business. Just 4% of them have never had a sexual partner. Money and sex: a classic combination.

(Some of these subjects might seem a bit random, but it’s a national survey so you’re going to have to deal with it.)

Nationally, 12% of students have never had a sexual partner before.

And while 70% of the students we surveyed have tried drugs at least once in their lives, 27% of those who haven’t done drugs are virgins.

Use this interactive graph to see how we stack up on the drugs and sex front.

The Tab surveyed 5,126 students in the second term of this academic year. Stay tuned later this week for more tidbits from our ‘study’.

Additionally, from a sample of 1,200 higher education students, 13% have experienced suicidal thoughts.

The survey was carried out by the National Union of Students

92% of participants report feeling mental distress– feeling down, stressed and demotivated.

A massive 74% of those suffering from mental distress experience it once a month or more, and almost one third suffered mental distress every week.

Course work was cited as the primary cause of distress for 65% of respondents, exams and study accounted for 54% and many also attributed it to financial difficulty (47%).

Exams getting you down? You’re not alone

NUS Disabled Students’ Officer Hannah Paterson said that the statistics reflected what many students across the country face on a daily basis.

“My primary concern is the fact that over a quarter of those surveyed did not tell anyone about their problems.

“A mere one in ten use care provided by their institution.

“We are currently meeting with mental health organisations in a bid to bring all stakeholders together to examine the standard of mental health care in UK universities.”

How do the NUS statistics match up with what Cambridge students experience? Keep an eye out for the results of The Tab’s Mental Health Survey, which’ll be published next month.

And when we think of Wikipedia, our thoughts are never far from its charismatic leader, Jimmy Wales.

Mr. Wikipedia himself last week attended a debate at the Union Society where he discussed the possibility of a gift based economy, alongside teammate and recent business partner Lily Cole.

As Colin Rothwell pointed out in his article Wicked-pedia, haters hate on Wikipedia because they claim it to be something more than it is. School teachers and supervisors alike assume it is arrogantly trying to replace academic resources with a pithy approach to academia. It’s not.

I sat down with Jimbo and his hypnotic blue eyes to discuss his baby, Wikipedia, its role in educating the populace and where he sees education going in the future.

Mr Suave (Credit: Thurstan Redding)

I read on Wikipedia that Nature once claimed that some parts of your site were as well written as The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Do you ever see Wikipedia overtaking traditional publications like this?

I think that now the best opportunity for traditional publications like that to continue to exist are in specialist encyclopaedias – only on a specialised topic for a specialised audience. That’s a lot harder for an open community to do, obviously, but in terms of the general interest with encyclopaedias, I really wouldn’t want to compete with Wikipedia – it would be very difficult.

So, do you ever see Wikipedia as being treated as a legitimate academic resource? Will people ever be able to quote Wikipedia in their university work?

No… and that’s not a statement about quality! It’s a statement about what I think the role of Wikipedia should be.

I don’t think people at university level or higher should study The (Encyclopaedia) Britannica for example – it’s not what an encyclopaedia is for; it’s to help you get into something, it’s not something you’d want to cite, and that’s the same with Wikipedia.

I also read on Wikipedia that you once identified yourself as ‘anti-credentialist’, do you see traditional institutes like Cambridge as being past it? Is there still a future in the university degree?

I think that places like Cambridge aren’t COMPLETELY outdated, but they will have to change as we see new modes of learning, as we see the rise of massive online courses…there’s a lot of things going on in education.

I don’t believe that, but I don’t think we have to put up with professors who aren’t good at teaching and only research. Some are good at both, but we have the room now to take the best efforts of the best professors who can really engage people’s minds, and really use technology to help them reach a bigger audience. And to take those better at research to do research.

That’s all folks…(Credit: Thurstan Redding)

Wikipedia is fast becoming a way of life for many of us. Thankfully, the man behind it is as equally inspiring and insightful as many of its entries.

Original Title:

Directed By: Tobias Lindholm

Starring: Pilou Asbaek, Søren Maling, Dar Salim

Running Time: 99 min

Few societies have disintegrated, and been allowed to disintegrate, like that of Somalia. After a series of military failures, most prominently the Battle of Mogadishu (more commonly referred to as Black Hawk Down), the UN force charged with restoring order withdrew in 1995, leaving the civil-war plagued country to rot. However, the increasing threat of piracy to shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden in the new millennium has necessarily returned some attention, resulting in one of the most ambitious efforts of international naval cooperation, variously involving 25 nations.

Hollywood too has returned to the subject: the true story of Richard Phillips, captain of an American vessel hijacked in 2009, will arrive on screens in November this year in the hands of Tom Hanks and Paul Greengrass, the director behind United 93 and the first two Jason Bourne sequels. A Hijacking, directed by Tobias Lindholm, takes a similar premise – a Danish freighter is boarded and a ransom demanded for the release of its crew – but could not be further from the shaky camera nervosity and frenetic action of the thriller genre Greengrass helped define. So much so that neither the aforementioned military operation nor the actual hijacking are given any screen time. Stripped bare of plot and action, the film thrives on the withholding of information and the reducing of decision and consequence to a terrifying simplicity.

On the one hand is the ship’s cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk), forced to make do with the lack of food and fresh water and wait for help to arrive, yet liable to be used as negotiating bait. On the other is the ship’s owner Peter (Søren Malling) in Denmark, who sees it as his duty to personally mediate with the pirates, yet aware that he is gambling with the lives of his crew every time he refuses to cough up the demanded $15 million. Each attempts the doomed task of trying to deal rationally and calculatingly with a situation that discards both at the outset. Peter in particular may be overestimating his abilities to separate emotional from business involvement.

And although Mikkel and Peter talk to each other repeatedly as part of the bargaining, Lindholm refuses to cut from one location to the other within individual scenes, feeding us only the information available to one character at a time. Additionally, almost every sequence is played out in real time, defined by entire minutes of tense silence, waiting for a response as the stakes escalate. What may sound tedious and lacking spectacle (and there is a definite element of the documentary filmmaker here, not that those two necessarily invoke one another), is as enthralling as it is frustrating – as realistic and as close as one would want to get to a real-life hostage situation.

A Hijacking enters territory most hostage thrillers never approach – the true feeling of a shared ordeal. When it takes a final, and entirely unexpected twist in its concluding minutes, it is impossible not to feel utterly drained. Clearly it isn’t safe to go back in the water just yet.