On our practice-based Stage and Production Management MA course, you’ll work closely with fellow GSA students to deliver stellar productions.
Through intensive seminars and workshops, you’ll be introduced to stage management and technical disciplines and begin your professional development planning. You’ll then work on a wide variety of production projects across performance spaces within the University and at external venues. There will also be opportunities to take on senior production-critical roles as deputy stage manager, stage manager or production manager on our public productions, under the guidance of our experienced and industry-connected staff.
You’ll also have the chance to complete an industry placement and your professional development planning will culminate in presenting your work at a London showcase event.
As a musical theatre performer you must be passionate, creative, and able to form a deep connection with your story, character and audience.
Guildford School of Acting (GSA) is one of the UK’s leading accredited drama schools, providing dedicated conservatoire training within a purpose-built environment.
Successful entry on to GSA’s MA Musical Theatre means you will be part of a carefully selected and committed ensemble of performers-in-training, equipped with the self-discipline and motivation to master new skills and refine existing capabilities. Building on our international reputation in musical theatre, this course will enhance your skills with opportunities to launch your career.
Our intensive MA Acting course offers you practical actor training focusing on technical skills in acting, voice and movement. These support a range of rehearsal projects, screen acting projects and public performances. You’ll also take professional development workshops and classes in audition techniques.
Your performance opportunities will include a devised project, a final public production led by a production team of industry professionals, and a Digital Screen Showcase.
We keep our cohorts small to ensure you get personal attention and contact from our expert teachers, who have extensive first-hand experience in professional theatre in the UK and the US. Our campus boasts great transport links to London, so you’ll be close to the heart of the UK theatre, London’s West End.
We want you to be a versatile and creative costume maker with the advanced technical construction skills to produce costumes for all types of performance.
You advance your costume construction skills through our range of taught modules and apply these in practical projects. Our two show seasons maximise your potential for learning ‘on the job’. You also learn about associated research techniques and examine your career development priorities. By the end of the course, you should graduate as a competent costume maker with a strong portfolio ready to take your place in the performing arts landscape.
This masters degree enables you to create and showcase an original production. We welcome applicants with a diverse range of skills and life experiences to contribute to our MA Acting (Company).
Our MA is an opportunity to develop or reinvigorate yourself as an actor and create original theatre productions. Working in teams, you learn how to take charge of your professional journey and become self-sustaining, by creating public performances adaptable to different venues and circumstances.
You experiment, innovate, and get to grips with contemporary approaches to extend your range of presentational skills. Through an immersive and ensemble-based approach you develop your technical skills with industry leading professionals. This paves the way for you to step out into the profession with the confidence and connections to be a success. Throughout the course you work as a year group to produce four performances before your final project. For this final project you form into smaller companies, or a single-person company, with a grant from us, to create and realise an original work, testing it out by finding audiences for this in external venues.
In association with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
This Masters programme allows composers and writers to focus on how new opera is created, developed and performed. Part of an exciting partnership between Guildhall School and the Royal Opera House, the programme centres around the creation of a 25-minute chamber opera which is fully staged in Milton Court Studio Theatre.
The programme admits three composers and three writers each year. During an initial induction module, students pair up into composer-writer teams. Each team develops a short opera scene, before going on to create full chamber operas. Two smaller projects allow you to follow your own creative pathway: in poetry, prose, dramatic or film script (writers), and in vocal or instrumental/ electronic works (composers).
The programme focuses on the collaborative nature of opera making, and each composerwriter team is supported by collaborative mentoring. Students also take part in one-to-one tutorials, production seminars and creative development workshops.
Led by Julian Philips, Head of Composition, Stephen Plaice, Writer-in-Residence, and Laura Bowler, composition professor, teaching is enriched through regular seminars with visiting professionals from the opera world including conductors and directors, singers and instrumentalists, designers and stage managers.
The programme collaborates closely with Guildhall’s award-winning Opera Department, led by Dominic Wheeler, with Guildhall opera singers forming the cast for the chamber operas created by composer-writer teams.
Practical experience of opera during the year is hugely augmented by the programme’s association with the Royal Opera House, which provides opportunities to see productions in rehearsal and performance, and to meet and network with key resident and visiting practitioners.
The Masters in Music Therapy aims to develop students’ musicianship and personal potential, and equip them with the knowledge and skills to work as a registered music therapist.
On this programme, students gain experience working with adults and children alongside qualified music therapists on placements in a variety of settings including special and mainstream schools, and with people who experience:
- Mental health problems
- Dementia
- Learning disabilities
- School exclusion
- Communication delay
- Autism
- Acquired brain injury or stroke
- Social, emotional and behavioural difficulties
During the programme, students must undertake a minimum of 40 hours of individual personal therapy as a requirement from the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). This is an additional cost not covered by the tuition fees (funding support is available - see our Postgraduate Funding page for more information).
A one-year Masters programme aims to bring together early-career theatre practitioners to develop new theatre and performance work.
Please note, this programme is undergoing periodic review during the 2022-23 academic year and is therefore subject to change.
This one-year Masters programme aims to bring together early-career theatre practitioners to develop new theatre and performance work. These practitioners include:
- Designers
- Sound Designers
- Lighting Designers
- Production Managers
- Stage Managers
- Video Designers
- Directors
- Writers
- All-round theatre-makers
Students work together in creative teams on an exciting and varied array of theatre projects. The programme is not intended to deliver core technical skills, but rather to develop your theatre making abilities, exploring your potential as a creative artist and enabling you to work with other students on a series of collaborative projects.
Mountview is currently the only UK drama school to offer Directing, Dramatic Writing and Producing as three distinct, specialised pathways within a single, unified Creative Practice MA framework. The course is designed for multi-hyphenate practitioners who are excited by collaboration and meeting the demands of the twenty-first century creative industries.
By bringing directors, writers and producers into one ecosystem, the course mirrors the professional world by fostering creative partnerships through shared engagement with modes of collaboration, creative enterprise, dramatic structures and critical contexts.
Students on the Producing pathway develop a robust and practical understanding of producing, across both the commercial and not-for-profit sectors. You will expand your understanding and critical awareness of current practices through extensive engagement with leading industry practitioners and academics.
The course concludes with the opportunity to put your learning into practice through the staging of a public facing, fully-realised festival of new work. VIEW Festival allows students to develop their pathway specific skills while also collaborating closely with the Dramatic Writing, Directing and Performance students.
Our MA Creative Practice graduates leave with an established network of industry contacts and prepared for high-impact careers as Commercial and Independent Producers, Creative Leaders, Theatre Makers, Artistic Directors, Venue Leaders, Playwrights, Screenwriters, and Dramaturgs.
STAFF AND PRACTITIONERS
The Creative Practice teaching team is led by Hamish Pirie and Dawn Ingleson as Joint Course Leaders, alongside Roy Williams as Distinguished Visiting Artist. Dawn worked extensively at the National Theatre as a creative producer and has also taught at LSBU, while Hamish’s directing credits include work at the Royal Court, Donmar Warehouse, Paines Plough and Traverse Theatre. Roy is a multi-award winning writer whose credits include Death of England: The Plays (National Theatre), The Lonely Londoners (Kiln and Jermyn Street Theatre) and Sucker Punch (Royal Court, Olivier Award nomination).
Recent guest tutors on the Producing pathway have included Alison King (Turtle Key Arts), Daniel Cooper (The Yard), Joseph Smith (Stage One), Will Bridgeland (Candoco Dance Company), Katie Town (Theatre Royal Wakefield), Jo Crowley (Aakash Odedra Company), India Crawford (Arts Council), Belinda Clark (Brixton House), Ed McGovern (Crossroads Live), Davy Berryman (The Lost Estate) and David Ralf (Theatre Deli).
MA Creative Practice students also benefit from industry masterclasses specific to their pathway, led by the world’s most prestigious creative powerhouses. Recent MA Creative Practice sessions have featured:
For over 25 years Mountview has been internationally renowned for the quality of its musical theatre tuition and our alumni continue to influence and shape the industry.
Our intensive 1-year MA programme delivers focused, culturally engaged, practical performer training. The course enables graduates to confidently enter the industry, fully prepared with the skillset to assuredly navigate the demands of any performance space.
COURSE CONTENT AND DELIVERY
Students receive over 30 hours of direct teaching time each week, with a maximum of 17 students per class.
Over the first two terms you will undertake skills training split equally between the three essential musical theatre skills – acting, singing and dance – including one-to-one singing lessons and classes in acting for camera in term two. In each term, the skills work is then applied to performance projects. These projects include work on non-musical contemporary texts, and classic and contemporary book musicals.
There will be additional lectures and seminars on devising, autobiographical and solo performance, as well as on concepts such as intersectional feminist, post dramatic, queer and critical race theories, socio/political theatre practices and the performance of knowledge.
Through the first and second term, all students undertake the Creative Project, creating an original piece of theatre or film, performed at the end of term two. The Creative Project is supported and developed by one-to-one tutorials and influenced by the concepts discussed in the seminar/lecture programme.
