By AMIT ROY SPURNED BY PEERS, OXFORD’S BAME STUDENTS STAGE DRAMA TO ACCLAIM ASIAN undergraduates at Oxford have joined forces with their fellow black students to mount a dramatic act of rebellion that they claim has “never happened before” at the university. The students have successfully put on a play in which every member of the cast and production team was from a BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) background. They say that for far too long, black and Asian students were not even being auditioned because drama was thought to be the exclusive preserve of “white students like Hugh Grant” (currently portraying Jeremy Thorpe in the BBC TV drama, A Very English Scandal). with Joel Stanley as Jason After challenging the assumptions of entitlement by white students from privileged backgrounds, the play they staged to standing ovations last month at the O’Reilly Theatre at Keble College was Medea, a Greek tragedy written by Euripides and first performed in 431 BC. Medea, a wife who is considered a barbarian and an outsider, is outraged, betrayed and humiliated when her husband dumps her for a new lover, Princess Glauce, the daughter of King Creon. She kills her rival by gifting her a poisoned cloak and crown, which also causes the death of Creon as he embraces his dying daughter. And in order to inflict the maximum pain on her unfaithful husband Jason, Medea murders their two young sons and even takes away their bodies so as to deny him the solace of giving them a burial. Two of the outstanding performances were by Charithra Chandran, a PPE student at New College (ironically, Grant’s old college), as Medea, and Shreya Lakhani, an undergraduate at Balliol reading Sanskrit and Hindi, as the Messenger. All the mayhem occurs off stage, and it is left…
You do not have access to this content. You need to create an account.
