Quiz in a play with a quiz

“It is also about the loss of pubs. It is set in a pub. In fact we are staging it in a pub on George Street.”

If anyone is well placed to usher Oxford audiences into a new concept in theatre it is Dr Lee — for in many ways he is something of a new concept in higher education himself.

When we first met four years ago, it was to talk about the world’s largest Great War archive, which had just been created at Oxford University.

He wanted to appeal to the public for letters, diaries, poems, artefacts and photographs that people had hidden away at home.

Expecting to meet a historian, it turned out that he was, in fact, the director of computing systems and services at Oxford University — although one who had trained as a Medievalist, was a member of the university’s English faculty and had a specialist knowledge about the Great War and the war poets.

The man in charge of the university’s IT services has even made news around the world after uncovering a postcard written by Adolf Hitler.

But it was to emerge that his interest in e-learning, digital libraries and stories from the trenches is more than matched by his passion for writing plays.

It would appear that he is very good at it, having won the Oxford Playhouse short play competition in 2007 and 2008 and the Galway Theatre Festival new writing competition two years ago.

Since then he has seen his plays performed in Oxford, London, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

His fifth play Dev’s Army — a comedy set in wartime Ireland that has been described as “Dad’s Army on a sortie into Father Ted territory — is touring in the North-West.

A number of his plays, such as The Ghosts May Laugh, set in a Western Front dug-out on Christmas Eve 1917, which went from Oxford’s Burton-Taylor Theatre to the Edinburgh Festival, have drawn on his interest in the First World War.

But his new play, Quiz Night at the Britannia, draws on his love of pubs, or more particularly his sorrow in seeing so many of them disappearing.

Fittingly, it is being staged by the Deck Theatre Company in a room above the Copa bar in George Street, Oxford, where it will be performed on Thursday evenings throughout July and August.

The play interweaves the stories of pub regulars, a government inquiry that will lead to the heart of a town being demolished — and, yes, a pub quiz.

And beware — the audience are expected to join the quiz along with the main characters, with answers collected and prizes up for grabs.

Dr Lee, 46, admits: “I used to go to a lot of pub quizzes. For a time I also wrote the quizzes at the Three Goats Heads in St Michael Street. It meant I was able to observe a lot of people. The play is set over three quiz nights. At the same time a government inquiry is taking place and the people involved go into the pub.

“Somehow the pub quiz and public inquiry become mixed up. The play is about what it is like to be in Britain right now.”

The outcome of the planning inquiry ultimately has implications for the pub.

“Pub closures started a few years ago. Now it is way out of hand,” said Dr Lee.

The play’s central character, the bar-propping quiz-loving loser Tommy, is given a passionate speech, angrily denouncing greedy developers and planners busily plotting the closure of pubs, the great symbol of Britishness and the heart of communities and social exchange.

It will certainly strike a chord with many in Oxfordshire well used to passing boarded-up inns.

When he wrote it the inquiry into the Iraq War was in full flow, but the Leveson Inquiry ensures the regular inquiry updates on the television news featured in the play will also seem all too familiar.

If Dr Lee’s pub quiz years made him an astute collector of characters, it should come as no surprise — for he can be surely counted as one of the most dedicated collectors Oxford University has known in recent years.

For years now he has been engaged in an epic Europe-wide search to find, gather and preserve in digital form First World War memorabilia.

It began with an appeal to the public to submit items reflecting the true experience of the war that were hidden in attics, old suitcases and cupboards The project has allowed Oxford University to build up one of the world’s largest Great War archives, containing over 6,500 items contributed by the general public, with contributions via a special website and through open days at libraries and museums throughout the country.

The success led to it being extended into the Europeana 1914-1918 project. Since last year it has been collecting contributions from Germany, moving on to Luxembourg, Ireland, the UK, Slovenia, Denmark and Belgium this year.

When he took his family history roadshow to Munich he was left speechless on being presented with a postcard sent in 1916, written and signed by Adolf Hitler.

At first sight it appeared to be just one of many postcards sent by soldiers serving in the trenches.

But Dr Lee quickly realised it had been sent from Hitler, then 27, written when he was recovering after being wounded, to an army colleague called Karl Lanzhammer.

“I looked at it and thought ‘this is serious’,” he recalled. “I believed it looked genuine and to be a postcard from that period. But I wanted to be sure and consulted a number of experts who were there.”

“I felt a shudder run through me,“ said Dr Lee. “I found it hard to believe that at a local event to record ordinary people’s stories, I was seeing a previously unknown document in Hitler’s own hand.

“I am a Medievalist and have held some very old documents. But I felt a sense of unease holding something Hitler had written and touched. When you hold something created by him, all sorts of thoughts go through your head.”

Perhaps the story of a future dictator with bad teeth and poor spelling, desperate to return to the front, will one day be featured in a new Oxford play.

The head of Oxford University’s IT services with a taste for drama is not a man to close down any options.