Film and Theatre

Film and theatre are two of the most powerful forms of storytelling available to human culture, and they share more than they differ. Both are concerned with performance, space, narrative, and the relationship between performer and audience. Theatre does its work in real time and physical space, while film fixes performance in time and shapes the viewer's experience through the camera.

Studying them together reveals how each form illuminates the other, and gives you a sophisticated understanding of how stories are told, how meaning is made in performance, and how audiences are constituted and addressed.

At Queen Mary University of London, this three-year full-time joint honours programme examines the dramatisation of the world across live and recorded media. You will engage with concepts of production, mise-en-scene, and spectatorship, developing fluency in the theoretical languages of both theatre and film studies. The programme introduces you to key critical practices in twentieth and twenty-first-century theatre and performance, as well as to film theory, history, and genre.

You will engage with primary works across both art forms, read theoretical texts, and develop your own analytical voice as a writer and thinker. Queen Mary's location in east London gives you access to a rich cultural landscape, with theatres, cinemas, and arts institutions of all kinds nearby.

You will develop strong skills in textual and visual analysis, research, critical writing, and the ability to make and defend sustained arguments about complex cultural objects. The capacity to think about representation, power, spectatorship, and narrative is broadly applicable beyond the study of the arts themselves.

Graduates from film and theatre programmes pursue careers in theatre production, arts administration, film production, journalism and criticism, publishing, education, broadcasting, and the wider creative industries. Many also move into roles in marketing, communications, and public relations, where the analytical and communication skills developed are directly applicable. Postgraduate study in theatre studies, film studies, or cultural studies is a natural next step for those who want to pursue research or specialist professional training.