Our BA Theatre & Performance course is designed to inspire your theatrical creativity and provide you with outlets to express it.

You will begin by studying theatre from a range of cultures and historical periods, then focus more intensively on theatre of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the work of international and British playwrights and performance makers such as Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Complicité, Caryl Churchill and Katie Mitchell.

The course investigates a range of contemporary global practices from verbatim to immersive, from site-specific work to examples of digital technologies in live performance. You will see performances ranging from west end theatre to the latest practitioners of 'intermedial' theatre and performance art. Throughout your degree, you will explore how directors, designers, writers and other theatre artists respond to and shape our rapidly changing world. You will learn practical skills from the first year, with opportunities to create performances in the final two years. You will also have the option of following a critical-only route.

You will explore histories and techniques of devising, producing, designing and directing, and learn how theatre works as an expression of real-world issues. Students studying BA Theatre & Performance at the University of Reading enjoy the best of both worlds, developing critical and creative skills in a dynamic environment.

Your first-year studies will introduce you to the histories and critical frameworks that inform each medium, and help you develop a range of academic and practical skills that will prove invaluable throughout the degree and beyond. For example, you will explore a variety of “channels of communication”, and be introduced to work across Chinese, Greek, Shakespearean and Noh theatre. We provide you with a thorough understanding of theatre conventions in order that your own experiments can have an even stronger impact. Throughout your first-year practical work you will explore how theatre has been effected by different social and historical contexts, and develop your own responses to this in group-based projects.

The second year is your chance to specialise in areas based on your personal or career interests. Through research and practice, you will explore work within and beyond classical and conventional narrative traditions, and learn about practitioners and movements that have challenged those traditions in various global and historical contexts. Your idea of theatre will be expanded by studying avant-garde, postdramatic, political and radical performance works. Optional modules allow you to investigate a variety of areas in detail, such as nationhood on stage and identity in performance, as well as a selection of film and television modules.

Throughout the degree, all taught lectures are followed by discussion and/or workshop-based seminars, enabling you to immediately respond to what you are learning. From start to finish, you will study both theory and practice – and learn how to effectively blend them together.

The final year presents you with the choice of diversifying your focus or further developing your knowledge in your chosen specialism. These modules are based around our academics’ current world-leading research and are all discussion-based.

**Careers**

97% of our graduates are in work or further study within 15 months of the end of their course [1].

Our flexible degrees are designed to develop the confidence and skills valued by both creative and commercial industries, providing you with a diverse range of career opportunities following graduation.

Many of our graduates work in the creative industries and their roles include the following:

- theatre directors

- actors

- playwrights

- film producers and directors

- visual FX experts

- cinematographers

- television producers

- critics.

[1] Graduate Outcomes Survey 2017/18; First Degree responders from Film, Theatre & Television.