Fame is a very curious thing in the Cambridge theatre scene. Often it can feel like a world in miniature, and this is only reinforced by the fact that it’s complete with its own celebrities. The more you get up on the stages of the ADC or Corpus Playroom the easier it is to achieve this status. Consequently, I get a curious little star-struck thrill when I see a big player of the theatre world around Cambridge. Excitingly, they exist outside of the shows they impressed me performing in, and they walk the streets like you and I.

I hardly need to repeat the concerns we’ve all heard before that various flavours of nepotism result in the same people being cast time and time again. This naturally results in certain names becoming very recognisable. But the chief curiosity of this kind of fame is its strict limitation. These celebrities are known, thought about and talked about very much within the Cambridge theatre scene. But it’s always a funny reminder when you start talking about a well-known figure within this world in the earshot of people who don’t care about the theatre scene and have no idea what you’re talking about. You try and subtly point out the celebrity while you’re walking by, and they loudly ask who on earth you mean.

“The theatre world is a bubble within the Cambridge bubble, and for this reason it can be doubly insular”

My friends would tell you that I’ve been guilty of this on more than one occasion. The theatre world can feel pretty all-consuming, and I say this as someone who only really dabbles in it. It’s a bubble within the Cambridge bubble, and for this reason it can be doubly insular. It can be a well-needed (albeit temporary) bursting of this bubble to have someone look at you baffled or even roll their eyes at you when you’re in full flow about who ended up with which roles in this term’s programme. All of a sudden these figures who have taken on a mystical celebrity status in your imagination are humanised as students within your peer group. What college do they go to? What subject do they study? I have genuinely no idea.

I think this is also a healthy antidote to feelings of bitterness that tend to rankle within this community. This is something I certainly admit to myself. It can be difficult to watch the Camdram pages for all the shows you auditioned for get filled up with the same well-known names. But they aren’t figures completely beyond your orbit, like (dare I say) real celebrities. We all have so much in common as students. If we applied the same principles to the famous out there in the big wide world, and took the next imaginative leap in viewing them as real human beings like you and I, I think celebrity culture would become a lot healthier. I think this is a lesson that the strange beast of student theatre fame can teach us.

I took another lesson from my little bit of experience of being on the other side of the equation. In Michaelmas of my first year, I was recognised by someone for the freshers play I was in while doing Bridgemas ice skating with my friends. This person actually came up to me to say hello and that they had enjoyed the show. It was a funny feeling, but a good one. It wasn’t actually at all like being famous. It felt more like becoming aware of being in a community.

“We should all be doing student theatre for the love of the game, not for the sake of compiling Camdram credits”

Since then, I have encountered a couple more people who have known my face from shows, although we had never met. The result has been friendliness. The fact is that we should all be doing student theatre for the love of the game, not for the sake of compiling Camdram credits. This is not the career world; this is a time to have fun, experiment, and explore our passions.

There will be plenty of time for ambition and competition later on. But speaking to someone who bothered to watch you perform, and bothered again to talk to you about it can be uplifting and invigorating. After all, even the purest performer needs an audience who cares. And the beautiful thing about the Cambridge theatre scene is that the audience don’t walk out of the theatre never to be seen again. They’re also your peer group, the people in this place who share your passions, and chances are you’ll work with them, watch them, or just bump into them in the ADC bar. We’re very much all in it together.

Cambridge theatre stardom may not be the healthiest thing. But if we start to look at these connections as community instead, then it becomes uplifting and vitally important. So don’t just point and whisper if you see someone on the street who you know from a show, consider saying hello. Spend a bit less time staring at people’s names on Camdram, and a bit more time looking them in the eye.