It has been customary since the dawn of time to open a discussion about Girton with some comment regarding the distance which separates the college from the town. Centre-college explorers tell tales of the 6 months, 10 hours and 25 minutes (or a similarly ludicrously extended amount of time) which a voyage to the red-brick college necessitates, cramped into the corpuses of a veritable cornucopia of buses, planes, trains, cars: the list inevitably goes on.

So let’s get one thing straight – Girton is not that far from Cambridge. The trip is a 40 minute amble at most (15 minutes on a bicycle), and well worth embarking upon for the sake of Girton: The Musical, which though now in its 11th year of production, shows no signs of losing steam.

“Girton: The Musical extends a hand of solidarity, and if it doesn’t always provide solutions to the problems it stages, it at least lets students know that they are not alone in experiencing them”

The plot is simple: the performance follows the fortunes of two dysfunctional couples, along with the legendary Athenian philosopher Socrates, his doe-eyed understudy Nicholas and a closeted homosexual public schoolboy, as they navigate their first days at Cambridge.

As you might imagine, this combination of weird and familiar story lines makes for a raucous and varied performance. The Girton Amateur Dramatics Society (GADS) stagger through sketches which are, in turn, side-stitchingly surreal, such as Socrates’ admission that although bearded, he’s actually a woman. Closer to home is Oscar and Katie’s painful struggle to keep the spark in a newly long-distance relationship.

While there’s an awful lot of humour in the production, liberally amplified by a well-watered cast and audience, its inclusion of episodes which deal with the everyday difficulties of transitioning to university means that the show also offers a degree of comfort. To an audience comprised mostly of potentially anxious freshers, Girton: The Musical extends a hand of solidarity, and if it doesn’t always provide solutions to the problems it stages, it at least lets students know that they are not alone in experiencing them.

While all of the performers and sketches were entertaining, there were a few that really stole the show. Michelle Spielberg is an obvious standout. Her choral prowess is practically angelic, and the middle-class, country-living prudishness that she brought to the role of Katie reduced me to hysterics every time. The scene in which Katie and her boyfriend Oscar try sexting was one of the funniest of the evening, culminating as it did, with the initially self-conscious couple descending into a Rocky Horror-style orgy of gyrations – even the curtains weren’t above being targets of their thrusting.

“Michelle Spielberg is an obvious standout”

Spielberg also shone in what was indisputably the show’s most memorable ballad, ‘The Lesbians of Newnham’, which saw Katie and the girls rush the stage dressed in only their nightgowns and armed with the best part of a dozen condommed cucumbers. Finally, pianist Chun Hau Ng’s performance should also be singled out. He barely registered a dud note all evening and his canticles were the spine upon which the success of the performance was propped.

Bringing people together: ‘Theatre is something that marks humanity’

All in all, then, my slog up to Girton was definitely vindicated. Yes, there were a couple of line flubs and the whole thing could certainly have been more professional, but I can’t help but feel that the botched bits were all part of the charm. Girton: The Musical is a long way from being polished or slick, but what it does have is heart, and the passion and energy of both the audience and the performers made it a show which will be stuck in my memory for some time