Acting & English
Acting and English brings together two disciplines that are both fundamentally concerned with how human experience is given form through language and performance. Acting develops the embodied skills of the performer: voice, movement, character interpretation, emotional responsiveness, and the technical craft needed to create compelling work for stage and screen. English develops close engagement with literary texts across poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction, cultivating sensitivity to language, an understanding of how narratives are constructed, and the ability to interpret and articulate complex meaning in writing.
Edinburgh Napier University's four-year full-time Acting and English programme takes both subjects seriously, developing practical performance skills alongside literary and critical competence. Your acting training will cover voice and movement work, scene study, text analysis from a performance perspective, improvisation, and the preparation of audition material, building the craft and professional habits that working actors need. Your English studies will develop close reading and critical writing skills across different periods and genres of literature, building the analytical intelligence that informs both performance work and a broader literary education.
The programme includes a year abroad, which gives you the opportunity to study performance and literature in a different cultural and theatrical tradition, broadening both your creative reference points and your academic perspective.
A typical entry tariff of 184 points reflects the programme's academic and creative expectations, and selection for the acting component typically involves audition or performance portfolio submission.
Graduates pursue careers as performers in theatre, television, and film, as well as in teaching, directing, theatre education, arts administration, voice coaching, and the creative industries more broadly. The English component also opens routes into publishing, journalism, and media. Many also go on to postgraduate study in performance, theatre studies, or English literature.