I wasn’t too sure what to expect when I went to see Wide Eyes Productions’ The Slip last week (written and directed by Orla Wyatt and produced by Milo Ghiandai). In two years at Oxford, I had somehow never made it to a piece of original student writing, and I arrived armed with all the usual, slightly cynical expectations: clunky, over-earnest monologues, low-budget visuals straining under ambition, and an audience politely disengaged. 

However, opening night of The Slip immediately dispelled all those assumptions. From the moment I entered the Burton Taylor Studio, I was gripped. It is not a large space, but its intimacy only heightened the emotional stakes of Wyatt’s story, bringing the audience uncomfortably close to every revelation, accusation, and fracture in the group’s relationships. 

Based on a true story once heard by the writer-director, The Slip centres around a fatal car accident on a country road. The premise is deceptively simple: Archie (Callum Beardmore) is driving friends Christina (Maisie Lambert), Billy (Sam Drury), and Daniel (Alex Smith) back from a house party during the early hours, when they hit a woman walking by the side of the road. As police questioning unfolds under the scrutiny of Inspector (Cait Kremenstein), the truth emerges piece by piece. What initially appears to be a tragic accident is gradually revealed to be something darker: Billy, drunk and reckless in the passenger seat, had grabbed the wheel and swerved towards a pedestrian with the chilling joke: “ten points for a pedestrian”. 

The strength of Wyatt’s script lies not in this final revelation, but in the moral fallout that follows. Rather than constructing a conventional whodunnit, The Slip asks what happens when a group of friends become bound together by a secret. That a fox crossing the road had caused the car to suddenly swerve. The tension comes not from discovering who is responsible, but from watching each character negotiate guilt, loyalty, and self-preservation, all complicated by alcohol-fuelled uncertainty and a tangled web of personal relationships.

Callum Beardmore’s Archie carries much of this emotional burden. While the police investigation provides the play’s structural framework, Archie’s simmering resentment towards Billy provides its emotional core. As layers of their shared history are stripped away, we learn that Billy has long occupied the role of the charismatic golden boy: more popular, more confident, always seemingly one step ahead. Archie, by contrast, is left wondering why he has remained in Billy’s orbit for so many years, even after leaving university. Beardmore impressively navigated this transition from controlled anxiety to explosive anger, culminating in a final act that felt genuinely unsettling. 

Sam Drury’s performance was equally compelling. While it would be easy to play Billy as a straightforward villain, the performance avoided this generalising caricature. Billy’s recklessness is undeniable, yet the play also exposes his insecurity and self-destructive tendencies. Drury excels at capturing the contradictions at the heart of the character: the effortless charisma that draws others into his orbit, alongside a deep immaturity that ultimately proves destructive both to himself and those around him. As his confidence is gradually stripped away, moments of vulnerability begin to emerge, complicating the audience’s response to him without ever excusing his actions. The result is a character who remains frustratingly human even as the audience’s sympathy evaporates, embodying the play’s wider exploration of toxic friendship, masculine insecurity, and the devastating consequences of thoughtless cruelty. 

Caught at the centre of these tangled loyalties is Christina (Maisie Lambert), perhaps Wyatt’s most tragic figure. Blackout drunk at the time of the accident, she is kept in the dark by the others for much of the narrative. As a result, she becomes a focal point for the group’s collective dishonesty. Chrstina’s complicated relationships with both Billy (her ex-boyfriend) and Archie (who she has been sleeping with) contribute to this, adding another layer of messiness to the group’s dynamic. Whether her involvement with Archie is genuine affection or an unconscious attempt by him to wound Billy remains unresolved, and the play is stronger in its refusal to provide a definitive answer. Lambert brought real depth to the role, conveying Christina’s mounting moral unease as she gradually realises that those closest to her may be concealing the truth about the accident. 

Meanwhile, Alex Smith’s Daniel functioned as the uneasy mediator of the group, caught between competing loyalties and increasingly aware of the moral cost of silence. His constant back and forth between truth and lies provides an important counterpoint to Archie and Billy’s increasingly volatile rivalry, grounding the play’s larger questions of guilt and accountability. As an ensemble, the cast succeeded in creating a web of friendships that felt genuinely lived-in long before the audience’s arrival. Their interactions carried the easy familiarity, private jokes, and unspoken tensions of relationships forged over years, making the gradual disintegration of those bonds all the more compelling to watch. By the play’s conclusion, not only the mystery had been unravelled, but also the friendships themselves. 

The technical elements of the production deserve equal praise. Juliet Taub’s lighting design made particularly effective use of the Burton Taylor’s intimate space, helping to delineate shifts between police interviews the night before and the present moment. At key points in plot, changes in lighting and colour subtly heightened the sense of unease without ever becoming distracting. Ice Dob’s sound design complimented the production’s visuals, building tension and underscoring the emotional weight of the play’s most dramatic revelations. Together, these elements elevated the play from an Agatha Christie-like whodunnit to a psychologically-charged thriller.

Opening night of The Slip demonstrated an impressive confidence from Wyatt, who serves as both writer and director. The play as a whole had a remarkable command of both character and atmosphere. The result was a tense and morally complex drama that explores not only the consequences of a moment’s recklessness, but also the fragility of friendship, the corrosive effects of guilt, and the stories we tell ourselves to avoid confronting the truth. 

Wyatt’s script handled the pacing of these weighty themes and gradual revelations with remarkable assurance. This was no mean feat given the play’s fragmented structure, which moves fluidly between interrogations on night of the accident, its aftermath, while also shifting between competing perspectives and imperfect recollections.

As the lights came up, I found myself still turning over the production’s questions – perhaps the strongest endorsement a piece of theatre can receive. The Slip is proof of the calibre of Oxford’s original student writing and theatre, as what could have been a simple mystery became a compelling study of guilt, friendship, and the consequences of a single reckless decision. Sharp, unsettling, and emotionally intelligent, The Slip is a striking showcase of the ambition and talent behind Wide Eyes Productions, while establishing Wyatt as a writer-director to watch.

The market for AI creative tools has gone from a handful of options to an overwhelming buffet in a remarkably short space of time. New products launch almost weekly, each promising to be the one that transforms your marketing, and for a small business owner or a marketer trying to make a sensible choice, the sheer number of options is more paralysing than helpful. Cutting through the noise starts not with the marketing claims but with understanding what actually separates one tool from another.

Look Past The Brand Name

The first thing to understand is that the brand on the box often matters less than what is inside it. Many creative tools are powered by the same handful of underlying AI engines, which means two products with very different names and price tags can produce surprisingly similar results, while two that look alike can perform completely differently. The quality of your output depends heavily on which engine is actually doing the work.

Tools that expose a selection of Adobe Firefly partner models give marketers room to test which engine produces the cleanest product shots before committing budget to a particular workflow. Understanding this saves you from chasing brand names and marketing hype, and lets you focus on what really matters, which is the quality of the output you can actually achieve for the jobs you actually need done.

Match The Tool To The Task

There is no single best tool, only the best tool for a given job, and grasping that will save you a lot of wasted money. An engine that produces gorgeous, atmospheric lifestyle imagery may be surprisingly weak at clean, simple product visuals, and one that excels at illustration may struggle with anything photorealistic. Performance varies enormously by task.

So be clear with yourself about what you actually need most. Is it social media graphics, product imagery, illustrations for blog content, or something else entirely? Identify your primary use case, then judge every tool against that specific need rather than against a general impression or an impressive demo built around someone else’s requirements.

Test Before You Commit

Most tools offer a free trial or a limited free tier, and you should always make full use of it before paying for anything. The best test is a simple one. Run the same realistic brief, ideally one drawn from your actual work, through every option on your shortlist and compare the results honestly, side by side.

The differences are usually obvious once you see them laid out next to each other, and a short, structured test like this prevents an expensive mistake. It is far better to spend an afternoon comparing tools than to commit to a subscription and discover three months in that it cannot do the one thing you most need.

Factor In The Practicalities

Output quality is important, but it is not the only thing that should drive your decision. Think hard about ease of use, because a slightly weaker tool that your whole team can operate comfortably often beats a powerful one that only you can drive. Consider how well it fits into your existing workflow, the licensing terms for commercial use, which genuinely matter for a business, and the ongoing cost as you scale up your usage.

The Content Marketing Institute has long argued that consistency and a good fit with your wider strategy matter more than any individual piece of software, and that wisdom applies neatly to AI tools. The best choice is the one that supports your overall marketing plan and that you will actually use, not the one with the most impressive feature list or the flashiest launch video.

Keep Your Brand Front Of Mind

Whichever tool you ultimately settle on, the goal is content that looks like you, not generic AI output that could belong to anyone. This is where a lot of businesses go wrong, producing technically impressive images that have no connection to their brand. Establish your style, your colour palette, and your tone of voice, then apply them consistently across everything you generate. The technology is the means, and your brand identity is the end it should serve.

A Simple Way Forward

If you feel paralysed by the sheer variety of choices on offer, the answer is to simplify rather than to keep researching endlessly. Pick one realistic task that you do often, test two or three options against it properly, and commit to the best fit for now. You can always reassess later as your needs grow and the tools evolve, which they will, quickly.

The marketers who win with these tools are not the ones who chase every shiny new release or agonise over finding the theoretical best option. They are the ones who choose deliberately, based on their actual needs, and then get on with using their choice well. Clarity about what you need beats endless comparison every time.

Sarah Outen was seventeen when curious seals surfaced beside her kayak off the coast of Scotland: “I remember very clearly having seals follow the boat and try and nibble at the toggles on the boat, and I just love that interaction,” she says. “It was as close to the water as you’re going to be. You’re never going to be off the water, but it was a way to be in that world.” 

The desire to immerse herself in the natural world without trying to conquer it has shaped almost every chapter of her life. Outen is one of Britain’s most accomplished endurance adventurers: the youngest person and first woman to row solo across the Indian Ocean, later the first woman to row solo across the Pacific from Japan to Alaska, before completing a 20,000-mile, mostly human-powered journey around the world by  rowing boat, bicycle, and kayak. The expeditions earned her an MBE, a Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society and several Guinness World Records, yet when she talks about adventure, records barely feature. Instead, she returns to the sea itself: its unpredictability, its wildlife, and the quiet relationship it demands. 

“I was very active, doing lots of sports at school,” she says. “I was very lucky. I had lots of opportunities through school for different sports and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and then through a local kayaking club.” She first learnt to kayak at around eleven or twelve, before discovering Ellen MacArthur’s account of sailing solo around the world as a teenager. “These different things kind of just led me to a sense that one day I would like to do a big journey somewhere, somehow, but I didn’t know what it would be.”

At home, “there was a lot of encouragement for trying new things. I don’t feel there was ever anything that we were told: we don’t want you to do that, don’t have a go.” The greater influence, however, came from watching her father live with rheumatoid arthritis: “I saw him not be able to do lots of things that he used to love doing. I saw him not be able to walk as much and become wheelchair bound.”  

For years, she interpreted that experience in the only way she knew how. “I’ve got to go and make the most of it, and at all costs will push through,” she says. Looking back, she sees something more complicated: “I’ve got one go in this body, and I need to really honour it, value it. Yes, push myself, and do things that I want to do, but I’ve got to really look after it. Because actually, I’ve experienced a lot of health challenges, in part driven by how I’ve pushed myself in the past, and sort of just ignored all the signals from my body.” 

The University of Oxford arrived almost by accident. She had applied to Worcester College without really understanding the admissions process and instead received an offer from St Hugh’s. This became one of the happier accidents of her life: “Just the idea of not being able to walk on the grass felt really formal,” she says of Worcester. St Hugh’s, by contrast, felt immediately welcoming: “There was something really relaxed about the atmosphere… it’s got these lovely big gardens that you can walk all over.” She still describes ending up there as “a total gift.” 

But Oxford was also harder than she had anticipated. During her gap year, she had been diagnosed with hypothyroidism. Only in retrospect did she realise how much it shaped her experience: “Some patterns that were playing out whilst I was at Oxford, they actually just weren’t being managed properly.” 

What kept her grounded was the water: “I loved being a part of the boat club, especially, and the fact that that, for me, was a way to get out and about pretty much every day of the week on the water.” She still laughs about one race against the men’s crew. “We won, we beat the boys… One of our crew members made us some T-shirts afterwards, saying: ‘Making boys cry since 2006′, because it was alleged that there were some tears in the boys’ crew.” 

However, a ruptured cruciate ligament during her first term ended previous hopes of an army scholarship: “I couldn’t do that anymore and I didn’t really have a plan at that stage. So I thought in my head, oh, okay, I’m going to row across an ocean.” Then, during her second year, the idea began to crystallise. An email advertising an Atlantic rowing race arrived just as Ben Fogle and James Cracknell’s crossing was being shown on television: “I was just blown away by the idea of it. I thought, wow, this is a really cool equation. I love oceans and I love rowing. Put these together.” 

Just before her second-year exams, her father died suddenly: “It was a real shock, and very quickly again, I knew that I still wanted to go and row across an ocean, but that actually I did want to do it solo,” she says. “Nobody knew my dad. Like, as in the people that I was chatting to that might become the team, didn’t know him. It felt like a very personal mission. The ocean was this big, unknown, sometimes scary place that I had to cross. And grief was also this big, unknown, sometimes scary place that I needed to find a way through and to sort of live with.” 

Turning that decision into reality took another three years: “To graduate, fundraise, build a boat, learn what to do with the boat, get sponsors, raise money, train, figure it out.” She describes it as solving a giant jigsaw puzzle: “Starting out with a mind map… okay, I’m here, I need to get to here, what are these different bits that I’m going to need?” What made it feel achievable was its ordinariness: “I had a real sense in that first journey that this isn’t rocket science. Other people have done it, so therefore I’ve got a good chance of doing it.” 

She puts a lot of emphasis on the beginning: “We all have things we would like to do. And also, we can sometimes get a bit caught up in all the reasons why we can’t, why we shouldn’t. So, often, I think even just getting to the start of any project, be it an ocean or a degree or whatever it might be, it’s a big deal.” 

Training for the row was surprisingly simple compared with organising it: “I focused on building an endurance base, so I borrowed a rowing machine and put it in my mum’s greenhouse, and I would go and row for a few hours at a time,” she says. First aid, radios, navigation, “how to fix bits of the boat,” took priority, on the theory that fitness would build itself at sea. What she hadn’t anticipated was the relentless mental load of being entirely responsible for herself: “The boat’s moving in some way, all of the time… you always need to be switched on, because you need to make sure you’ve closed the door so that if you were to capsize, suddenly you’re not flooded with water. It was a big adjustment, and I think that took me by surprise a little bit, was just how much of an adjustment that was.” 

To survive months alone at sea, she learnt not to think in terms of the ocean: “I was reminding myself that I was as prepared as possible, and just taking it a little bit at a time, cutting down the overall journey… What about the next couple of days? What about the next hour? Sometimes, just what about the next minute?” It is a philosophy that now extends far beyond her expeditions: “We can get really overwhelmed when we look at everything that we’re trying to manage. There’s something going: okay, what can we control? I can’t control the weather. But I can control the thoughts that I’m having, or how I’m relating to those thoughts. I can control how I’m looking after my body, what I’m eating, and when I am sleeping. Bit by bit, then we can find a way through the stormiest of times, or the biggest of obstacles, when we kind of break it down into little bits.” 

The ocean tested that outlook almost immediately. Her first attempt lasted just eleven days before deteriorating weather forced her back. “I looked at it as a warm-up lap,” she says. “Yes, I had failed. I had not made it across the ocean, but I was looking at it as: great, I’ve just survived eleven days at sea. I looked after myself. I still want to go back and have another go.” 

The second crossing took 130 days. It made her the first woman to row solo across the Indian Ocean and only the fourth person ever to do so, although she dismisses the records almost as quickly as they’re mentioned. “It was more about what the journey meant to me than it did about any statistic or record,” she says. “For me, it’s more about the experiences… certainly with that first journey, it was about honouring my dad and honouring my grief and my healing, really.” Her emphasis is on sincere gratitude: “I just feel extraordinarily privileged and lucky, fortunate to have had the support of so many people… whether it’s a big sponsor putting in money, or Joe Bloggs at the end of the road encouraging me.”  

She expected to miss the water when she landed, yet “about a month before I was due to land, I didn’t want to go back to land,” she says. “I was so comfortable in my boat world that I was a bit scared about what it would be like to transition back to being on land.” The landing itself, in Mauritius, was dangerous. “I ended up crashing onto a coral reef, essentially,” she says. Once she was safe, the adjustment turned out to be its own ordeal. “It was quite mind-boggling. It was quite stressful to try and keep tabs on things,” she says, remembering watching other people move her belongings around. 

“At sea, I had very limited battery supplies that were charged by the sun. It was a real matter of life and death that I managed that battery supply… whereas on land, I had people who haven’t had those experiences, and they are leaving lights on, they’re wasting some food.” Confronted by a supermarket shelf of ten kinds of orange juice, she says it “was really stressful in new ways”. Alongside all that, there was real pleasure too. “It’s lovely to see friends and family. It was great to be able to walk on land and appreciate all the different foods… It was great to get a massage, my muscles were happy. I got to see my mum’s dog again.” 

That heightened sensitivity has never quite left. On her later round-the-world journey, she watched wind patterns shift: “seeing disruption to that, which was having a direct impact on what I was doing and plastic pollution, which was really worrying”. What troubles her most is the distance most people keep from it: “There’s still quite a lot of blind spots for a lot of people. It feels like there’s this kind of ‘Oh, it’s out there somewhere, my activities don’t matter, or it’s not impacting me yet.’ That feels bothersome and is really worrying to me.” 

The pace of human-powered travel transformed the way she experienced the world: “You feel a mountain range very differently when you’re chugging up it slowly on a bike… you would have felt the changing of the seasons, the changing of the landscapes.” The bicycle, she discovered, was also a universal conversation starter: “Even if I didn’t have the same language, we would see bikes, and there would be this sort of shared sense of ‘Hi, yeah, we’re on this thing together.’”

The biggest challenge came in the North Pacific: a typhoon, subsided to a tropical storm by the time it reached her, which she chose to ride out: “Knowing what I know now, in that wonderful thing of hindsight, I wouldn’t have stayed. But that was who I was at that time. I kind of looked through all the information that we had, and I thought that we had a good chance of getting through it.” 

What followed was chaos: “It was so violent and so chaotic and so frightening to be a part of that.” Three days strapped into her bunk in a racing harness, watching through the cabin door: “All of these waves, these huge waves, topping out at fifteen metres, just looked like the Alps. Everything was white, and there was spray going everywhere, and I saw an albatross just soaring over the top of it. And I just thought, wow, I wish I were the albatross. I have never been so frightened in my life, certainly not for a sustained period. It was horrible and very uncomfortable.”  

The Japan Coast Guard rescued her, but her boat, Gulliver, could not be brought with her and was cast adrift. “To me, it felt like I had sort of let my boat down somehow,” she says. “When you’re solo with a boat, you’re a little team, you look after each other.” 

The sheer weight of emotional aftermath came after: “My way of coping was to sort of almost get on with it, and kind of put it to one side, what had happened, and just focus on moving forward, because I wanted to go back to sea.” Months later, the reckoning was almost forced: “I was having nightmares, I was crying all the time. I was scared all the time. I was really struggling.” When Gulliver herself turned up years later in the Philippines, during the making of a documentary about the journey, it started again. “Lots was being stirred up, and around that time, Gulliver turned up in the Philippines, which brought up lots of memories and emotions. It was like, okay, there’s another layer of healing to do here. We need to deal with this in a more proactive way.”

By the time she finally came home for good, something had to change: “So much of the journey had been about pushing forwards, going, keeping moving, going, getting to the next bit, going,” she says. “And actually, what I came to understand with hindsight, a few years later, was that it took quite a few years to process, to settle, to unwind some of the energy that was in my body from those journeys… now I needed to learn this whole new way of being that was more about softness and yielding and gentleness.”  

She laughs gently at who she used to be: “I laugh at my younger self that she was so audacious to put together something as complex as that and as massive. I definitely didn’t fully comprehend just what it would take, emotionally, physically, financially, logistically, energetically.” Asked what she would tell her eighteen-year-old self, she says: “I wish I had known more about the impact of stress and food on my health, and on my autoimmunity and had more softness, and that I paid more attention to things like stretching.” Then she lets herself off the hook: “Some things you have to go through stuff to learn the lessons, I think. You’re not ready to know them until the point at which you’ve learnt them for yourself.” 

That difficult year, 2018, is also what led her to psychotherapy. She had been advised, coming off the journey, to take her time before deciding what came next. Working with a couple of different therapists, one of them an equine therapist, something became clear: “I thought, I want to be alongside people as they explore their worlds.” Indeed, the parallel with her old life feels obvious to her now: “It does feel like it’s an adventure to sit alongside somebody exploring their world. We don’t know what’s going to come next. We don’t know what’s going to happen. I feel similar senses of awe at the tenacity of the human spirit. What humans can navigate, and how we can find meaning and healing out of some of the darkest times, blows my mind.” Some of her sessions happen outdoors now: “I love that nature becomes my teammate, and the donkeys are my teammates.” 

Listening to Outen now, it’s striking that the oceans themselves almost fade into the background. The crossings were extraordinary, but they were never really the destination. They became the landscape through which she learnt to live with grief, embrace uncertainty and, eventually, exchange relentless endurance for the courage to meet both the world and herself with softness.