There are sixteen student shows being staged in Cambridge this week.  At that volume, it would be physically impossible to see them all, and it is practically impossible to get to more than a tiny fraction – particularly for those who perform themselves.  Once duty has been done in going to see your friends perform, it is difficult to be all that discerning about what else you see.  The only things to go on are hearsay, up to three reviews and reputation.  And these don’t always amount to the most reliable pointers, especially once personal tastes are factored in.  Guesswork it is, then.

This being – as everybody’s whingeing expressions keep telling me – week five, perhaps the astounding number of plays are indication that the thespian way to keep the week five blues at bay is to put on a show.  But this isn’t just a mid-term peak – there’s another sixteen coming up in week seven.  Mysteriously only four are officially on camdram for week six, which can’t be the full story.  Maybe this preference for odd weeks reflects the inventive quirkiness of Cambridge thespians.

There seem to be three approaches to staging a play in Cambridge.  You can take a solid, well-written classic, learn the script and hope you don’t embarrass yourselves by managing to screw it up.  Alternatively you can take a classic and be inventive with it, hoping that your experimentation with the set and staging succeeds more often than it fails.  Finally, you can do something completely different: dig out a weird and wonderful play or pen one yourself, stick it on a stage and see what happens. 

In Cambridge there’s pleasantly little of the first option, which is the lifeblood of professional provincial theatres and Am Dram everywhere.  There could be more of option two, but it is option three – ‘be quirky’ – that dominates the festival that is Cambridge theatre.

Unfortunately this stream-of-consciousness style of theatre is probably only possible because Cambridge theatre is student theatre, where the whole financial issue isn’t quite so pressing.  In the real world, people have to earn money, and the time commitments required to make good theatre are so great that people must inevitably charge or starve.  These economic facts mean realising your ideas requires money as well as drive and filling out production application forms.

And what if your show could never run at a profit?  The quirkier shows out in the real world are often produced in full knowledge that they are spending money other shows have made.  Presumably the situation in Cambridge is similar: putting on something wacky at the Corpus Playroom means you are being subsidised by last term’s Stoppard; at the ADC, by the Footlights Panto and Lent musical.  Still, in this amateur student world the figures must be pretty small, and if there is any sense of guilt, the voluminous output of quirky theatre suggests it isn’t very strong.