Theatre with Creative Writing

Theatre and creative writing together address two of the most fundamental ways in which human beings make and communicate meaning: performance and the written word. Theatre is the art of making live experience, creating situations, characters, and events in shared space and time with audiences, and studying it at university level means engaging with a vast range of forms, from classical drama and musical theatre to immersive performance, devised work, and applied theatre in community and educational settings. Creative writing disciplines the imagination, developing your capacity to craft narrative, dialogue, poetry, and other textual forms with intention and skill, and understanding the relationship between what is written and how it performs is central to both arts.

At Queen Mary University of London, this three-year full-time BA develops substantive expertise in both disciplines. The theatre component gives you a deeper understanding of theatre and performance across different cultures and historical periods, engaging with a wide range of theatrical forms and examining the theoretical and critical frameworks through which performance is understood. The creative writing element develops you as a writer through practice and feedback, building craft in fiction, scriptwriting, poetry, or non-fiction depending on your interests, and connecting your writing to the broader literary and theatrical traditions from which it draws.

The combination allows you to approach both performance and writing with genuine interdisciplinary understanding.

Graduates of theatre with creative writing enter careers across the creative industries and beyond. Many work as writers, theatre makers, playwrights, directors, drama facilitators, arts educators, and community arts practitioners. Others move into arts administration, literary publishing, cultural journalism, broadcasting, and creative roles in the digital media sector.

The communication, analytical, and creative skills developed by the degree are valued across a wide range of professional contexts, including education, public relations, marketing, and the voluntary sector. Many graduates continue to postgraduate study in theatre, creative writing, performance studies, or education, building specialist expertise for academic or professional development.