The National Student Drama Festival has been running for fifty one years. And yet every year it feels new-minted - like a definitive year-zero moment. So why look back?

The Festival is one of British theatre’s best kept secrets. Ironic given that the Festival was originally created as a collaboration between The Sunday Times and the National Union of Students, and has given the world its first sightings of such theatrical giants as Timothy West, Tim Pigott-Smith, Simon Russell-Beale and Harold Pinter.

The first festival began on the 1st January 1956 hosted by Bristol University and held in venues around the town - it is perhaps fitting that this first festival occurred at the rough mid-point between two of the most seminal moments in modern British theatre history: the UK premiere of Waiting For Godot before it, and the epoch-making Look Back in Anger after.

In those days the six entered productions competed for a single prize - The Sunday Times Drama Trophy - which was won in the first year by students of Regent Street Polytechnic with their production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which was directed by a young Timothy West and featured in its cast a certain Clive Wolfe, who over the subsequent years was to play a crucial role in the continuation and survival of the Festival.

As the fifties continued, the Festival continued to score massive, prophetic hits. Consider this review of a play seen at the 1958 Festival, from Sunday Times drama critic and festival organiser Harold Hobson.

“…The Room by Harold Pinter, presented by the Old Vic Theatre School and the Department of Drama of the University... was a revelation... The play makes one stir uneasily in one’s shoes, and doubt, for a moment, the comforting solidity of the earth.”

Remarkable stuff. All the more so when one considers that on the same day the Festival also saw the first English production of The Shepherd’s Chameleon by Eugene Ionesco in a production from New College, Oxford, including a young Dennis Potter in its cast. The following year saw similar debuts from Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka and Caryl Churchill.

These early years set a pattern which was to continue throughout the festival’s history with the roll-call of famous names seeming to go on and on endlessly: directors Terry Hands and Braham Murray, Lamda principle Peter James, Guardian Theatre Critic Michael Billington, actors Ronald Pickup, Michael York, and Bruce Myers, alongside Peter Sissons and Tessa (later Baroness) Blackstone, so name but a few who appeared in the early sixties.

In 1965 Clive Wolfe was first invited to join Harold Hobson as a judge for the festival. This was the first step on the road that was to see him become the Festival’s first artistic director in 1970: a post which he held for thirty years until retiring to become the Festival’s first president.

At the beginning of the seventies, with student politics at their most militant, the running of the festival was taken over for three years by a student-led “working party”, after a vote presided over by NUS president Jack Straw, which sought to enforce hard-left vetting and ensure that all the work seen at the festival was newly written and ideologically sound. The Working Party typified many of the worst aspects of student politics in the early seventies - obsessive bureaucracy, rabid anti-authoritarianism and an obsession with procedure which made any decision taking a near-impossibility. This way of doing things was quickly overthrown in 1973 after another student-led vote handed back full control of the Festival to director Clive Wolfe.

Throughout the remainder of the seventies and into the eighties the Festival continued to grow in size and reputation, with original participants returning as highly regarded professionals to deliver workshops and act as judges, while its hit-rate at spotting the stars of tomorrow continued apace. It is important to recognise, however, that as well as these “stars” that the Festival projected onto the theatrical firmament, the NSDF has always been an incredible place just to watch, experience and discuss some of the most cutting edge work being created in British theatre.

Yes, sometimes parts of the student population can be alarmingly artistically conservative, lagging behind new developments, refusing to take the avant garde seriously and preferring to stay in a comfort zone of antiquity or (admittedly brilliantly observed) kitchen-sink naturalism, but for each such production, there will be several, as seen repeatedly at the Festival, which grip the imagination of everyone present and offer a real glimpse of the future. For example: when Mark Gatiss and Steve Pemberton (now of the League of Gentlemen) offered their show Damage Your Children to a shocked audience; or when a few years earlier Phelim McDermott (one of the creators of West End smash Shock-Headed Peter) first performed the intricate, beautiful, truly theatrical Cupboard Man.

It is impossible in a limited space to give sufficient credit to the literally hundreds of astonishing plays that have passed through the festival over the years, or to fully recount the names of those behind them who have gone on to national or global prominence. Perhaps, as the old cliché goes, the Festival is only as good as its last outing, in which case it is still going very strong indeed, and under its new energetic artistic director Holly Kendrick 2007’s festival saw outstanding, pioneering and hugely entertaining work from across a dizzying spectrum of genres. If the National Student Drama Festival can learn anything from its history, it is only that it has nothing to fear from the future.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette