Our MA Playwriting course is an intensive one-year programme designed to provide a genuine gateway into a writing career in the theatre and performance industries.
Like our successful MA Screenwriting course, the MA Playwriting is taught by practitioners and is vocationally-oriented and industry-focused.
Over the course of the year, you will work with leading industry practitioners to develop your playwriting, pitching and dramaturgical skills. You will learn about and develop skills in writing for performance across a diverse range of contexts, genres and themes.
By the end of the course, you will have developed at least one full-length stage play, a collection of one-act dramas, a full-length festival play and at least one play that adapts elements of a classic text to engage with a contemporary context.
You will have access to individual career guidance and training in how to navigate entry-level writing work in the theatre and performance industries. The course features regular speakers from the industry, including returning alumni who have established successful careers as writers, dramaturgs and producers.
In Semester 1, you will study the basics of playwriting as a craft, with a focus on form and structure. This will include engaging with plays in textual form and in live performance, and the study of plot/story, character, genre, scene development, monologue and dialogue, dramatic action, beginnings, endings, features of staging and audience relationship.
You will study a diverse range of new and historical works, including historical plays that have brought about innovations in dramatic form and structure, as well as new writing staged in Britain and further afield in recent years.
In the second semester, we turn to industry-oriented study, focusing on developing new pieces for festival contexts, and on the skills and resiliencies needed to sustain a living in playwriting.
There will be an industry day based at our studio theatre on campus, with talks from directors, agents, producers, publishers, literary officers and writers.
An intensive, condensed course for graduates of any discipline or those with some acting experience. The minimum age is 21 and there is no upper age limit.
Postgraduate students begin individual programmes relating to their needs in voice, movement and auditioning, as well as career-related studies, at an early stage in the course.
The course also includes comprehensive career guidance and opportunities to show your work to agents and casting directors through a season of productions and an end of term showcase in London’s West End.
MA Performance: Theatre Making at Wimbledon College of Arts invites you to re-imagine the possibilities of theatre and performance and expand the horizons of your practice.
MA Performance: Theatre Making will enable you to develop your creative and critical practice. It will encourage you to become a confident and articulate theatre maker and researcher.
Performance at Wimbledon is approached through questions of politics and ethics as well as aesthetics and practice. The course asks you to examine them through practical investigation and experimentation in a studio context.
You will think critically about your theatre making. You will want to place it in the context of contemporary performance and visual culture.
The course focuses on:
- Theatre-making as an integrated, multi-disciplinary practice. Combining, for example, writing, design, acting and dramaturgy.
- Developing innovative compositional strategies for performance-making as a studio-based, embodied and material practice.
- The creation of post-dramatic and politically engaged performance.
- Collaboration.
