Activities
Each term, the society performs one or more pieces of (usually comic) theatre, with emphasis on low budget and high creativity. Staples include pantomime, comic plays, revues, and skits, but in the past the society has also shot a short film and put on a music talent competition, amongst others. All are invariably realised on a minimal budget to maximise the donations to charity. CULES performances can be demanding, with difficult audiences (for instance, disabled children, or hospital patients...) and highly improvised facilities (such as a school gymnasium).
The pantomimes performed are almost always written by members of the society, and include many parodies of popular songs (such songs by ABBA or Queen) with accompanying dance moves, while the comic plays may be original works or adaptations (such as the Jeeves and Wooster plays by P. G. Wodehouse, or a play by Oscar Wilde), see below), through making full use of the members' (sometimes unusual) possessions and creative talents. Elaborate costumes and props are often created at great effort, with little more than cloth, cardboard and string — often adding to the humour in a production.
In Michaelmas and Lent terms, the productions are taken to special needs schools, homes for the elderly, homeless shelters, and hospital wards, for whose occupants these performances often represent a welcome departure from an otherwise monotonous daily routine. A final performance is organised for the students of the university. This final performance often entails script changes, usually through adding lewd or suggestive dialogue which would not have been appropriate for other audiences.
In Easter term, the schedule is compressed into the final week, before May Week. The productions during Easter term tend to have much smaller casts and shorter running time to allow them to be rehearsed and performed in a week. In recent years a series of productions have been run in parallel, with a consistent theme (such as Greek myths or plays by Shakespeare). As usual, these plays are almost always written by members of the society, and often heavily lampoon their subject matter. The plays are dedicated to Emma Clements, a CULES member that was lost to cancer in 1996, and performed for a student audience in one of the college gardens of Cambridge.
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