She has written plays, adaptations, translations, opera texts and poems, and taught play-writing at Royal Holloway College and for the Arvon Foundation.
[2] She also wrote music criticism before leaving Australia for The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, and from 1988 to 1991 for The Independent,[3] as well as contributing to a variety of magazines including The Listener.
Oakes wrote the text for the television opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (1995) by the Irish composer Gerald Barry, commissioned by Channel Four.
She also translated the French Algerian playwright Fatima Gallaire's Pebbles for Your Thirst (Des Cailloux pour la Soif, Radio 4, 2002).
Her translation of Werner Schwab's modern classic Die Präsidentinnen was staged in the West End in a production by Richard Jones at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1999, with the title Holy Mothers.
Her translations from German also include Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (under the English title Luise Miller), Ödön von Horváth's Italian Night, Thomas Bernhard's Heldenplatz, and two contemporary plays, Moritz Rinke's The Man Who Never Yet Saw Woman’s Nakedness, and Christoph Nußbaumeder's To the South Seas by Gherkin-plane.
Her dramaturgical work included Stephen Daldry's only opera staging to date (Manon Lescaut at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, 1991), and advising on his production of von Horváth's Judgment Day at the Old Red Lion, Islington in 1989 (qv: Wendy Lesser A Director Calls page 39)).