Playwriting MA

Facts about Playwriting

Qualification	MA
Duration	Full time: 1 year Part time: 2 years
Attendance	To be confirmed
Course structure

Choose Kingston's Playwriting MA

This course is for aspiring and experienced playwrights, performance writers and dramaturgs who are keen to establish their unique voice in response to recent innovations in contemporary theatre and performance. While the course acknowledges the continuing centrality of a particular dramatic tradition that was first articulated by Aristotle, it also recognises that once 'alternative' forms such as visual and physical theatre, live art and postmodern performance have equal validity in contemporary culture. We believe that writers have an important role driving such movements, and in forging the theatrical forms of tomorrow.

What you will study

Teaching on this course includes a foundation in the traditional writing skills of characterisation, dramatic structure, dialogue and action, and also in collaborative and interdisciplinary creative approaches that go beyond solo and text-based authorship. There are opportunities to develop improvisational and 'workshop' approaches to writing.

You will also be encouraged to engage in solo and written creative tasks. In recognition of the growing interaction between new writing and devising (collaborative creation), you will also work with your fellow playwrights in the role of performer, deviser or dramaturg. The course covers:

specialist skills in playwriting in a variety of modes;
practical techniques and principles of performance making as a solo and collaborative process;
historical, ideological and cultural contexts in which traditions and innovations of playwriting and performance writing have evolved; and
approaches to researching performance and creative practice, including practice-as-research and reflective writing.

Assessment

For your final project you will either submit a full-length play script (which will feature in a showcase rehearsed reading at a professional venue) or a dissertation. Earlier assessments will prepare you for this project and will take the form of writing for performance and academic writing and presentations. You will be set practical creative tasks from your first workshop, sharing the outcomes with your tutors and peers in a supportive and constructively critical atmosphere.

The profession

"The last ten years have been the most exciting of my career, because of the way theatrical forms and traditions are blurring. Playwrights are responding to forms that were once marginal, so that we now we see brilliant moments of physical and visual theatre within scripted plays and in main house productions." Lyn Gardner, theatre critic for The Guardian, speaking to MA students, November 2009.