The Stand
For students, by students 

Who knew that talking about trains for two hours could be interesting? Interchange is a Mermaids play written and directed by Pluto Conway, and its probing exploration of real social issues had me hooked from the start. Lucy Clark as James and Eilidh Reed as Violet. Credit: Mermaids. A railway crew deliberate on both future and past as their employment is threatened by the transition from steam trains to diesel. The railway is the perfect symbol for this transitionary period

We’re halfway through the semester, so that can only mean two things: first (not so fun), it's deadline season, where my coursework is piling up faster than I can say ‘I am the very model of a modern Major-General.’ Second, if my citation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most famous song is anything to go by, we’re now in the heart of student theatre season, where the weeks of long rehearsals finally pay off. Credit: @standrewsgands, Instagram Last week saw the endearingly notorious

Credit: Letterboxd From a shockingly young age, the period drama has held an unbridled power over me. Whether I was seven years old sobbing over Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey or eighteen years old celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, the period drama has always offered me and many others an escape from the modern world into a time of formality and romance. So, as you may assume, I have been eagerly anticipating the release of Georgi

Credit: Unsplash What happens when we use AI in the arts? Is art truly ‘art’ if it’s AI-generated? These are the questions that are rocking creative organisations everywhere. In Arts Council England’s Literature Overview for 2026, they highlight the lack of a ‘standardised agreement’ when it comes to the use of AI and its acceptability, which is only one half of the problem. Not only is the absence of a cohesive policy causing rifts within the literature sector, but it is als

Credit: @phoebebridgers, Instagram Have you ever taken videos of a concert only to never watch them again, or maybe have your view of your favourite artist blocked by a sea of phones held high in the air? I am certainly guilty of singing softly and standing still so as not to “ruin” my videos, and would surely be more uninhibited if it weren’t for my phone. In our digital age, everything seems to be affected by our phones, and concerts are no exception. To counter this, ind

I recently had the exciting opportunity to interview Philip Colbert, a famous contemporary artist, designer, and former philosophy student at St Andrews. He is known by many as the ‘Godson of Andy Warhol’, and he grew up in Perth, Scotland. During our conversation he provided inspiring and perspective altering ideas including the philosophy behind bright colours, unique ideas on human connectivity, destruction and temporality, and the University of St Andrews as a sociologica

2026 has been a big year for many reasons. There was the Winter Olympics back in February; we went back to the moon for the first time since 1972 and the USA had its 250th birthday. However, in my humble opinion, as an English student, the best thing about this year has been the plethora of book to movie adaptations; from age old classics to newer stories, we have been inundated with retellings. I will admit that the cynic in me worries that this recent influx is due to our l

‘Some people say I remind them of Amy’, sings RAYE on her sophomore album, This Music May Contain Hope. ‘Some spit through their keyboards, I’ll never amount'. Amy Winehouse’s passing was truly tragic, and, as one of my all-time favourite singers, I mourn the loss of her virtually every single day. With her raw, honest songwriting, uncompromising sense of style, and vintage sensibilities, Amy was unapologetically herself, and refused to bend to the will of the music industry

Creating art can serve as a catalyst for personal transformation, or as a means for political voice, which is especially important when one is isolated from the outside world - or incarcerated. I have been thinking about this across the summer, intrigued by the intersection of personal and political elements when creating art inside of prison. When I visited San Francisco in August, I saw a display from an artist called Orlando Smith. He is currently serving eight life sent

Warning: Spoilers Credit: Focus Features Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility is a story imbued with girlhood, asserting itself as the rightful heir to the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Oakley’s adaptation questions whether we can ever be masters of our emotions and, more importantly, whether we should try to be. Following two sisters, Elinor with her reserved sense, and Marianne with her wild sensibility, we feel every emotion, concealed or not, right to the very

Credit: Backrooms (2026), A24 One thing that has really surprised me about 2026 is that this year has been absolutely huge for movies. Not only have there been more hits at the box office, with both Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey being huge summer hits and grossing well over 1.5 billion dollars, it appears to be the case that more and more films are at the forefront of the cultural conversation. For cinephiles like me, I will try to see everything that I can, but

This past summer, as I waited for my London internship to start, I spent my days reading the news and doing deep dives into the New York Times Opinion section. The most recent article that I read from it was Jessica Grose’s “Stop Location-Tracking Your Friends and Lovers.” Her piece argues that we are opting into our own surveillance state and ruining our relationships by tracking each other and allowing them to track ourselves (something I completely agree with). No one has

We often give St Andrews the nickname of “the bubble.” So much so that during graduation the iconic “The Bubble Will Miss You” slogan is projected on the walls of St Salvador's Hall. For many, the town's three streets are paved of gold. Populated by the young, beautiful, and wealthy, here to receive a top tier education before “entering into the real world” - that which St Andrews is definitively not. Weekends are spent attending black-tie events for which tickets cost up to

If you have been in a bookstore in the past few years, you have probably walked past a table with a sign that says ‘BookTok.’ The books on this table probably consist of a mix of romance books with cute cartoon covers and fantasy novels with complex symbols and dragons. BookTok, the reading subgenre of Tiktok, has changed the publishing industry. More and more, books are marketed by their ‘tropes’, and in my opinion, the quality of novels has drastically decreased. In 2020, d

Samuel Stephenson Looking back over the year, I’m really grateful that I’ve been able to go to the cinema so many times, seeing such a broad range of different films, and most importantly, getting lost in good stories. There’s nothing quite like it. 2025, for me at least, has definitely felt like the best year for films in a while. I wanted to make a list of my top 10 movies of the year to show just how good cinema has been lately. Disclaimer: While some of these movies had