Theatre and Performance Studies

Theatre and performance studies is a discipline that takes the full range of live and recorded performance, from ancient Greek tragedy and Elizabethan drama to immersive theatre, devised work, and digital performance, as its object of inquiry. It asks what theatre is, how it has functioned in different societies and historical periods, how meaning is made in performance, and what distinguishes great from mediocre work. It is a discipline that requires both critical intelligence and the willingness to engage directly with the making and watching of performance as a lived, embodied, and social experience.

At the University of Warwick, this three-year full-time degree places you at the centre of both watching and producing theatre. The curriculum engages you continuously with live work, within the classroom and beyond it, and the Warwick Arts Centre at the heart of the campus gives you regular access to a professional venue presenting high-quality work across theatre, dance, music, and film. The programme nurtures new creative and analytical talent, engaging you with critical and theoretical frameworks that help you understand and articulate what performance does and means, while also developing your own practical and scholarly capacities.

A year abroad is built into the programme, giving you the opportunity to study performance in a different national and cultural context, broadening your understanding of how theatre works differently across the world.

Warwick's intellectual environment and its arts centre infrastructure make it an unusually rich context for studying this subject.

Graduates go on to careers in theatre making and production, arts administration, dramaturgy, critical writing and journalism, education, broadcasting, community arts, cultural policy, and the creative industries more broadly. Many pursue postgraduate study in theatre and performance, directing, or applied theatre, building specialist expertise for professional or research careers.