Although they are all professionals they are all expected to muck in said

“Although they are all professionals, they are all expected to muck in,” said Dr David Crilly, the director of the festival, which is now in its 10th year. “We all build the sets, put up the lighting towers, lay the cables.”They are also expected to take part in a rigorous social life. Punting, rounders, pub pool, bar football tournaments etc are all compulsory. “There’s 10 in each company so everyone has to join in to make the five-a-sides work,” said the effusive Crilly. But the Japanese will not, even if they know the answer, because part of their culture is not appearing to know more than your neighbour. Ask the class to go into pairs and talk about music and an Arab may come back and say he’s not being paired with a woman; the Japanese will come back and ask what kind of music.” The process is artificial, but it is an effective accelerator. Morning classes are followed by afternoon games and day trips designed to bridge cultural gaps among pupils of different nationalities about what is acceptable in class.”You learn there is some truth in national stereotypes: ask the group an open question and an Italian will begin and talk for hours.

Common purpose was not deemed a sufficient cement on the two-week courses at the language school down the corridor. “When they arrive we have a whole programme of ice-breakers – name games and non-language games designed to build trust,” said Helen Holwil, the young course director. Rituals of courtship are just the unofficial part of the community-building process. “We deliberately programme group activities in the free time – swimming, a quiz night, a barn dance,” said Mr Brittain. “And they are all responsible for setting up the performance area and clearing it afterwards.” Thus, they hope, the balance between self-discipline and youthful rebellion will be arrived at.Similar processes were at work among the other groups visiting the college. “Richard, stop chatting her up,” one young fiddler was admonished as concentration wandered towards the end of the morning’s three-hour section practice for the first violins. “This way,” said Richard Brittain who runs the enterprise, “they can make progress on nuances and textures.”Progress is made on other fronts too.

They meet only for three five-day sessions during the holidays – Easter, summer and Christmas – when they put in at least eight solid hours’ practice. The day I arrived, Girton was hostess to three separate groups: the actors of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival who were ensconced for 11 weeks; the teachers of St Andrew’s Language School, who were in residence for two months; and the members of the Essex Young People’s Orchestra, who were there for just five days.
It was mid-morning break in the red-brick Victorian gothic college with its trim lawns and stately cedars, and the adolescents of Essex were sitting in the TV room watching Teletubbies Communities do not come much more temporary than this The orchestra exists for only 15 days each year. Its 98 members, aged between 14 and 18, do not rehearse on a weekly basis like a school orchestra. The current haphazard approach to policing it has to change; otherwise, it is going to take more than a few token invitations to No 10 to mend the bridges.The author is a Visiting Fellow in Law at the University of Essex and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics.. I have developed a theory about why actors stereotypically call one another darling But you will have to be patient I will come on to that in a minute.

I hit upon it in Cambridge, at Girton College, to be precise. The elusive concept of community has been my goal in this month- long tour of the nation and the various summer schools that fill our universities during the vacation seemed the place to examine it in its most transient form. It is not as though we are talking about a few social deadbeats, the hard-core fringe-dwellers that were the targets of 1970s stereotyping. Today, each weekend, at least half a million young people – typically they are employed, law abiding and middle class – take ecstasy It may be the biggest mass drugs experiment in history. While a national intelligence-gathering effort has been established, there is to be no comparable monitoring body for police-youth relations. The Association of Chief Police Officers says the matter falls within the conventional community relations mechanism.Efforts have been made at a local level to improve relations, but according to Alan Lodge, a Nottingham youth worker who has documented police activity for 27 years, “every meeting designed to work out a solution has been used by police merely as an intelligence-gathering exercise”.This is not good enough. “A pathology is setting in,” says Peter Styles, a co-ordinator with the group for the past five years, “and it is not getting any better.”The problem is not helped by the inconsistency of police tactics.

Surrey Police, for example, has a virtual “zero tolerance” approach to dance parties, while the force’s counterpart in Norfolk is ambivalent. Internal reports from the two national units established to monitor police activities – the Southern and Northern Central Intelligence Units – indicate widely differing views among police representatives.A Drugs Czar might be able to iron out these anomalies, but the far greater need is for a change of attitude. As far back as 1994, 3,000 youngsters laid siege to the local police station in protest at what they described as police persecution. Michael O’Byrne, chief constable of Bedfordshire Police, is now at the forefront of the police campaign for the drugs policy rethink.Justice?, a national watchdog group which monitors police activity, says that relations between police and youth have deteriorated markedly since 1993 – even before the death of Leah Betts, daughter of a former policeman.