"When the Blackbird Sings". Creation Theatre

All aboard for a Creation Theatre, site-specific, Magical Mystery Tour.

Creation, thirty years old in 2026, has become the non-pareil of Oxonian hybrid theatre over the years. They’ve done Midsummer Night’s Dream as an iambic treasure hunt through the back alleys and gardens of Oxford, and Sherlock in Summertown, where audiences picked up clues to a street crime even worse than the Council’s bus gates. Now they’ve teamed up with the Schwarzman Centre and director Erica Whyman to create a bus ride through history, accompanied by some of this great city’s most significant, if marginalised, unsung heroes.

Crucially, When the Blackbird Sings isn’t just a history of Oxford. It’s a history of Blackbird Leys, the vibrant estate barely two miles east of the Radcliffe Camera. How many students find their way there? You could probably count them on one hand. Built in the 1950s as housing for factory workers, it’s traditionally been snubbed by the supposedly smarter parts of town. But Blackbird Leys has community, soul, continuity and life. The annual Leys Festival is an explosion of music and art. And this production has its roots in that festival.

Starting at the Blackbird Inn (packed with locals all waving cheerily at the wary theatregoers nervously donning their headsets), the show starts on the fringe of Blackbird Leys Park, where the spirit of Yemoja, an ancient water deity from West Africa, gradually resolves into Paulette, daughter of Jamaican immigrants, and an activist and midwife in 1960s Oxford. Played with irresistible verve by Charlyne Francis in a whopping sixties wig, Paulette becomes our spirit guide for the evening, narrating the bus journey, chatting with other characters, and ultimately leading us to demonstrate for racial equality in 1966 (and by implication today). The presence of passers-by phases her not one jot. In fact, it’s one of the many joys of the evening to see how townsfolk react (or don’t react) to what’s going on in their midst. Teenagers kick a football just behind the ancient goddess. Graduates on electric scooters zip past moments of high drama. At one point a jogger actually trips over a hastily positioned light, before disappearing into the night. It’s as if the headphones have turned us into clairvoyants, and we’re watching a succession of ghosts, invisible to those around us.

And for the most part they are ghosts. The Oxford that Paulette and the other characters see is the Oxford of their day, not ours. ‘They’re planning to build a library here soon’, she says as our bus glides past Blackbird Leys Library (opened 1968). And our final destination on this tour through time and space? The Oxford Maternity Hospital, which once stood on the site now known as the Schwarzman Centre.

Along the way, various characters from history board the bus and engage both Paulette and the audience/passengers in conversation about their lives. There’s Tommy the bus conductor whose experience as a Jamaican immigrant contrasts with Paulette’s. Going back in time, we meet Johannes, a German Lutheran refugee from 1942; Debbie, a stoned hippie student from 1969. In 1913 the bus is halted by a group of suffragettes with placards who get on board and have us all shouting for women’s votes until the terrified conductor persuades them to leave. ‘Any fatalities?’ he asks with nervous concern. The furthest we go back in time is to the year 727, when we meet St Frideswide herself, founder of the city of Oxford, as she fled a forced marriage. Like so many of the other characters, she came here to escape persecution, and one of the show’s most atmospheric moments comes when Frideswide rises from amongst the graves outside the University Church to address us in poetry that predated books.

Other real historical figures populate the story: Alain LeRoy Locke, the first African-American Rhodes scholar; Reverend Dick Milford, pioneering leader of the University Church; Catherine Singh, daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh, who was educated at Somerville College and became the lifelong partner of her chaperone Lina Schäfer. This is the Oxford history that may not be widely known, but should be: individuals who left their mark on both town and university. And the picture that emerges is fascinatingly ambivalent. It reveals Oxford as a place that gives with one hand but takes away with the other. It welcomed refugees but never let them feel at home. It allowed African-American Rhodes scholars but hardly any colleges would give them somewhere to live. It admitted women eventually – but only after male students marched in protest and hanged a woman in effigy. It accepted Afro-Caribbean nurses but wouldn’t pay them the same as indigenous ones. These struggles were by no means limited to Oxford of course, but as a focal point of new ideas, ancient traditions and itinerant scholars, it was, and is, at the coal-face of issues that affect the whole country.

Theatrically, all this makes for an emotionally and literally immersive experience. It’s stirring, funny, pacy and original. The heart of it all comes when we dismount temporarily outside the Bodleian Library and make our way to the first floor of St Mary the Virgin. There, in the very room where it happened in 1942, we watch a re-enactment of the meeting at which a group of concerned locals, fuelled by tea and biscuits, determine to put pressure on Winston Churchill to send aid to Greece, which was under siege by the Nazis. They decide to call themselves the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, or Oxfam.

The writers, Natty Mark Samuels, Afsaneh Gray, and Creation Artistic Director Helen Eastman, have done extensive research, and the sense of history oozes out of the bricks as we pass. Strangely, the one area where they are on shakier ground is the present. A key character in the production is Huda, daughter of Afghan refugees, who has won a place to read Medicine at Magdalen College in 2026. Huda, played with convincing passion by Ella Afghahi, rides with us, full of hope and anticipation. But later we discover her optimism has been crushed. She finds Magdalen full of public-school snobs who make her feel excluded, and the college does nothing to cater to her particular needs beyond inviting her to tea with the Chaplain and suggesting she take up rowing. The problem with this is that it’s a reversion to an outdated stereotype. In common with other Oxford Colleges, a substantial majority of Magdalen’s undergraduates now come from state schools. Iftar meals in Hall and Diwali celebrations are just as much a feature of College life as Evensong. The version of reality presented by Huda perpetuates a myth about Oxford that many people may want to believe, but whose day is past (and it may even dissuade some of the talented students the University is keen to attract). In the same way, when a tour guide character talks to us about the Bodleian, he tells us the University treats it as a fortress, keeping knowledge out of the hands of ordinary people, and preserving it only for the elite. But again, that isn’t entirely true. The Bodleian explicitly admits non-University readers, including independent researchers, through its Reader Card scheme.

Given the thoroughness of research in the rest of When the Blackbird Sings, the irony is that a production devoted to rescuing historical Oxford from easy stereotypes occasionally falls back on easy stereotypes when it reaches Oxford today.

That quibble aside, we arrive at the Schwarzman Centre better informed, substantially more educated, and thoroughly entertained. For the final scene in the stunning atrium, we sit at tables like students ourselves, and the ghosts of the past vanish like overdue library books, back into the stacks of history. Walking home afterwards, Oxford feels richer, deeper and more complex than ever. We’re all moving through it. Which of us will leave a mark behind?