In an interview with Lyn Gardner a few weeks back, she mentioned that the last theatre company of any note to emerge from Cambridge was Complicité, back in the Eighties. Meanwhile, other universities, drama schools, community groups and theatres have produced ground-breaking companies like Punchdrunk, Kneehigh, Frantic Assembly and Curious Directive. I’m interested as to why Cambridge has in the last twenty years given us Sam Mendes, Tom Hiddleston and Rebecca Hall but nothing to match those great group efforts.

What is a theatre company? It’s a group of people who come together and decide they want to tell stories in a particular way, whether by immersing the audience in the playing space, or using fast-moving multimedia, or puppets or masks or dance or what have you. Despite the insane number of people involved in Cambridge theatre, how often do you hear that a bunch of actors have decided on a style they want to pursue together in the long-term, over several plays, developing it as they go? It just seems antithetical to our whole culture here. We are, for better or worse, individualists.

The Cambridge drama world exists in a constant state of flux, with people finishing one play only to become attached to a totally new one, with a new team and a new vision. Yes, there are directors who will work with the same actors and crew again, but more out of a trust in their abilities than in a collaborative effort to further a creative goal. This can be a good thing – no matter how cliquey you think Cambridge theatre is, the size and endless opportunities are preferable to a university where about 15 people do everything, and getting into a play basically requires you to know one of them.

And yet. A clique that comes together with a sincere long term project can be a very powerful creative force – a group of clever, ambitious people who are comfortable with one another can spark ideas off each other at a frightening rate. You might say that’s the whole point of a university. Surely at Cambridge, of all places, there must be this kind of untapped potential, new frontiers in theatre just waiting to be crossed, ready to be funded by the pooled assets of a few generous but obscure college drama societies, or even particularly generous college grants. The Watson and Crick of theatre must be here somewhere.

We have had Wield The Matter and The Movement, but – and I would be happy to be corrected on this score – they didn’t seem attached to any great over-arching new idea. I grow old in university terms: I’m staring my 22nd birthday straight in the face. It’s too late for me to start a theatre company, so I’ll use this space to make another plea to freshers: think long term. It’s easy to focus only on your own career prospects.

But the strength of theatre has never really been in individuals, however much we’d like to believe in the hero myth of Olivier or Brook. The future is in companies. It’s time we joined it.