Course Overview

This highly distinctive MA in Text and Performance, run as a partnership between Birkbeck and RADA, brings together cutting-edge practice and scholarship in theatre and performance. Join us and you will work with Birkbeck's experts in theatre and performance studies and RADA's faculty and visiting theatre practitioners to experience both making and studying theatre. This course does not offer actor training but will deepen your critical and practical understanding of theatre and performance practices in context, and leads to a prestigious postgraduate qualification from the University of London. Taking the dramatic text as a critical starting point, our course encompasses drama from the early modern period to the contemporary. In rehearsal, you will create new theatre and performance work responding to set texts and themes. You will also engage with performance techniques to develop your skills as a playwright, director, and dramaturg. In academic lectures and seminars, you will encounter theoretical, historical, critical, and philosophical writings. You will theorize live performance and write about the ways in which new performance work is informed by both contemporary concerns and older theatrical traditions and legacies. In the final dissertation project, you will exercise your own creative voice as a director, dramaturg, playwright, or scholar.

General Eligibility

You will need to have, or be expecting, a second-class honours degree (2:2) or above, usually in an arts subject. As part of your application, you will need to provide a 1000-word critical analysis of a production you have seen recently. This can include discussion of text-based performance or dance-based work and can also include art installations. This piece should offer a critical analysis of the production: describing it carefully and engaging with it critically in relation to the meanings it might have produced in performance and the means through which these meanings were produced. You will need to attach this written task to your application documents. Once you have submitted the main part of your application, you should allow up to 48 hours for the additional document upload link to become available on your application portal.

Part Time Work Details

Language Requirement

• If English is not your first language or you have not previously studied in English, our usual requirement is the equivalent of an International English Language Testing System (IELTS Academic Test) score of 6.5, with not less than 6.0 in each of the sub-tests.