General entry requirements

Minimum requirements

You will have, or be expecting to obtain, at least a 2:1 undergraduate degree from a UK university or an equivalent qualification from an overseas university. Your degree will normally be in an arts, humanities, media or social science-related subject.

Alternative subject routes for entry are possible if you can demonstrate that you have suitable experience and aptitude in order to meet the range of demands of the course.

The University of Warwick operates an Equal Opportunities Policy and values Diversity; it welcomes applications from people of all backgrounds.

English language requirements

You can find out more about our English language requirementsLink opens in a new window. This course requires the following:

• Band B
• IELTS Overall (Academic) score of 7.0 and minimum component scores of two at 6.0/6.5 and the rest at 7.0 or above.

International qualifications

We welcome applications from students with other internationally recognised qualifications.

For more information, please visit the international entry requirements pageLink opens in a new window.

Additional requirements

There are no additional requirements for this course.

Core modules

Researching Performance/Performing Research

This module considers the research methods that are central to applied and socially engaged performance making and research. It addresses a range of research skills, methods, critical frameworks and areas of study that inform processes of making and creating performance in these contexts. It opens up debate around the questions and ethical considerations that arise when employing specific research methods in these contexts in order to develop informed critical perspectives on different approaches in the field.

Socially Engaged Performance: Interventions and Provocations

Working through case studies focused on pressing social issues such as the climate crisis, austerity and homelessness, this module is concerned with how creative methodologies are being employed in activist forms of socially-engaged art and digital based arts practice that are about social change. It focuses on the potential of theatrical and performance modes to pose questions and invite reflection through its ability to intervene, surprise, disrupt, subvert, transform and imagine possible future worlds. It considers how theatre-making and creative approaches to digital practice can foster networks, collaborations and movements that are about tangible change within and across communities.

Enhancing your Professional Profile

Rooted in advice and guidance from established practitioners in a range of settings, this module offers practical insight into the skills and knowledge you will need to develop and build your professional profile. It will explore what it means to have a portfolio career; how you establish a company and promote your work; the importance of making connections and working with collaborators; project initiation, budgeting, management and evaluation. The module will also explore how to shape funding applications that tap into the cultural zeitgeist and respond to different briefs and the needs of organisations whether they are in the educational, criminal justice, health, charity or international development sectors.

Final Project (core) with a choice between Written (15,000 words) and Practical routes

The programme culminates in an extended independent project that you will design, manage and deliver with support and guidance from a supervisor. It offers an opportunity to draw together knowledge and skills developed on the MA on a project that reflects specific interests, artistic practice and career trajectories. As part of the Final Project, you can choose to undertake a 15,000-word dissertation or a practical outcome that may take the form of a performance, digital project or community-based output.

Optional modules

Optional modules can vary from year to year. Example optional modules may include:

• Theorising and Facilitating Applied Theatre: Ethics and Reflective Practice

Through a dynamic combination of theory and practice, this module investigates what it means to be a reflective practitioner by exploring diverse approaches to understanding and facilitating applied theatre projects. It provides a conceptual and practical underpinning for how and why theatre and performance modes are used with specific client groups and in different environments. As part of this module students gain experience of planning and delivering applied theatre workshops by working with one of our associate companies. In previous years this has included work with groups experiencing homelessness, with refugees, and in special education needs schools.

• Options from other units in the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, or across the University

Please visit the Theatre and Performance Studies websiteLink opens in a new window to read more about the optional modules offered on this MA.

Teaching

Teaching methods will vary and include lecture-seminars, workshops, case studies and student-led presentations/workshops. The course will provide opportunities for students to learn through study with professional practitioners and organisations in the applied theatre and socially-engaged fields to ensure that the course focuses on the practical competencies required to be an employee within an organisation or as a freelance practitioner.  

It may also be possible to further specialise and deepen your practice by taking modules from MAs in other related disciplines. You will also benefit from having two intensive weekend teaching blocks (subject to module choices) that will facilitate a more immersive teaching/learning experience with professional practitioners.

You will complete essential preparation (e.g. reading, desk research, studio-based practice) for each session, and we encourage you to read more widely around the topics explored. 

The course also offers the scope to further develop and refine your practice through a flexible final project that can be taken as a written (15,000 words) or practical route (practice-based project and 4000-word documentation). In both cases support will include regular meetings with project supervisors, presentations of project proposals (to enable peer and tutor feedback) and work in progress demonstrations (to monitor progress and enable peer and tutor feedback).

Class sizes

Groups will normally consist of fewer than 15 students in most modules.

Typical contact hours

You will normally attend two 3-hour sessions each week during the Autumn and Spring Terms. In the Autumn Term, you will participate in weekend intensive. Depending on your choice of options, you will also participate in a weekend in the Spring Term.

If you are a part-time student you will attend one 3-hour seminar a week during the Autumn and Spring Terms of Year One and Year Two. You will also attend one weekend intensive in the first year of study and, depending on your choice of modules, a further weekend intensive in your second year.

Assessment

Assessment processes, methods and outcomes are designed to enhance your personal and professional development. You will encounter ‘real world’/employer-focused assessments that may include the creation of creative projects, the delivery of a workshop, the presentation of a creative brief, the submission of a funding application and evaluative reports. You will be assessed individually and, in some instances, as part of a group.

Reading lists

If you would like to view reading lists for current or previous cohorts of students, most departments have reading lists available through Warwick Library on the Talis Aspire platformLink opens in a new window. 

You can search for reading lists by module title, code or convenor. Please see the modules tab of this page or the module catalogueLink opens in a new window.  

Please note that some reading lists may have restricted access or be unavailable at certain times of year due to not yet being published. If you cannot access the reading list for a particular module, please check again later or contact the module’s host department.

Additional course cost

Mandatory costs will include materials and printing for project assessment work at approximately £50 in total for the course. There may also be costs associated with travel to/from shows residencies (if these are offsite), and other engagements with professional practice up to £40. Purchase of a laptop computer, at approximately £400, is recommended.

Your timetable

Your personalised timetable will be complete when you are registered for all modules, compulsory and optional, and you have been allocated to your lectures, seminars and other small group classes. Your compulsory modules will be registered for you and you will be able to choose your optional modules when you join us.

Your career

A person who undertakes this MA programme might pursue the following career trajectories:

• Applied theatre practitioner/facilitator
• Community arts organiser
• Cultural coordinator and partnership manager
• Theatre in therapeutic contexts (health and care sectors)
• Theatre in Education or Education Officer in a professional theatre/museums
• Arts Officer in Local Government
• Theatre for Development
• Work in the charitable/NGO sectors
• Research and Teaching in the FE/HE sectors

Our department has a dedicated professionally qualified Senior Careers Consultant offering impartial advice and guidance together with workshops and events throughout the year. Previous examples of workshops and events include:

• Careers workshop for Theatre and Performance Studies Students
• Discovering Careers in the Creative Industries
• Careers in Radio Film and Television
• Warwick careers fairs throughout the year
• A history and DIY Guide to setting up and running a Theatre Company

Theatre and Performance Studies

Explore the world through the lens of Theatre and Performance Studies with one of the top departments in the UK.

Offering academic rigour, practical skills and connections with the industry, this degree has career prospects both within the arts sector and far beyond. You’ll be taught by world-leading academics and cutting-edge theatre practitioners.

Get to know us better by exploring our departmental website.Link opens in a new window

Our courses

• Applied Theatre: Arts, Action, Change (MA)
• Theatre and Performance Studies (MA by Research)
• Theatre and Performance Studies (MPhil/PhD)

Core course team

anna six

anna six’s research explores the intersections between arts and health. In particular, her work intervenes in cultural politics and clinical practices in relation to madness, mental health, and psychiatry. Her recent monograph Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness examined artistic practice and uncovered the clinical lessons of creative work. six’s current project is investigating the politics of tenderness and questioning the meaning, nature, and practice of ‘care’. Her artistic practice with her theatre company, Idiot Child, is likewise engaged with questions around health and wellbeing. The company explore difficult feelings and experiences through performance and their current project, Never Gonna Give You Up, explores loneliness.

Saul Hewish

Saul Hewish is one of the country's leading practitioners in the use of drama and theatre with offenders. He was a founder member and former director of Geese Theatre (UK) (est. 1987) and since 1996 has worked in a freelance capacity developing drama-based responses to crime within youth offending teams, social services departments, and special educational settings.

In 1999 he co-founded Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation), with Chris Johnston. Over the last twenty years this company has built a strong reputation for innovative and experimental arts-based projects within the criminal justice system in the UK and across Europe. This includes theatre and digital video projects in prisons as well as the production of cross artform projects that span the divide between prison and the wider public. He is a co-author of Challenging Experience: An Experiential Approach to the Treatment of Serious Offenders and was a recipient of a 2005 Butler Trust Certificate Award, a national award which recognises exceptional work by staff in HM Prison Service.

Nadine Holdsworth

Nadine Holdsworth’s research spans questions of representation, participation, citizenship, political change and cultural value. She has worked on the creative activism of a number of leading mid-century practitioners including Joan Littlewood and John McGrath and published English Theatre and Social Abjection in 2020, which explores how theatre and performance can be used to illuminate pressing social issues and marginalised groups in society. These concerns are central to her current body of research and socially-engaged projects addressing arts, creativity and homelessness (you can read about this work here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/artscreativityhomelessness/). Nadine is also a Trustee of Underground Lights, a Coventry-based community theatre company for people who have experienced homelessness, mental health issues and social isolation.

Yvette Hutchison

Yvette Hutchison is a South African academic whose work focuses on Anglophone African theatre, dance and intercultural performance. She has taught on and worked in various theatre for development and community theatre projects in Africa and the UK. In 2015 she co-founded the African Women Playwrights Network through an AHRC-funded project to virtually connect African women-identified creative practitioners with one another, programmers, funders, educators and audiences. Her current collaborative project is with South African, Dr Lliane Loots, artistic director of the FLATFOOT Dance Company and JOMBA! Festival. Their project Encountering disability through contemporary dance in Africa is tracing how disability/ integrated dance is being used to negotiate citizenship in various African countries including SA, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique and Nigeria.

Bobby Smith

Bobby Smith’s research and practice examines the ways in which theatre and performance offer artistic and creative approaches to activism, education and social action. He was previously a freelance practitioner with experience in settings including schools, youth centres, within the criminal justice system and internationally. He also managed and coordinated applied theatre projects – for example, a drugs education and sexual health project in West London schools. Bobby has worked as a consultant for several charities, writing resources and training staff, particularly in the area of Theatre for Development.

Bobby’s most recent work includes building a network of theatre practitioners exploring violence in Rwanda, Kenya and Northern Ireland and projects which consider the climate crisis with young people internationally.

Tuition fees

Tuition fees are payable for each year of your course at the start of the academic year, or at the start of your course, if later. Academic fees cover the cost of tuition, examinations and registration and some student amenities.

Find your taught course fees  

Fee Status Guidance

We carry out an initial fee status assessment based on the information you provide in your application. Students will be classified as Home or Overseas fee status. Your fee status determines tuition fees, and what financial support and scholarships may be available. If you receive an offer, your fee status will be clearly stated alongside the tuition fee information.

Do you need your fee classification to be reviewed?

If you believe that your fee status has been classified incorrectly, you can complete a fee status assessment questionnaire. Please follow the instructions in your offer information and provide the documents needed to reassess your status.

Find out more about how universities assess fee status

Additional course costs

As well as tuition fees and living expenses, some courses may require you to cover the cost of field trips or costs associated with travel abroad.

For departmental specific costs, please see the Modules tab on the course web page for the list of core and optional core modules with hyperlinks to our Module Catalogue (please visit the Department’s website if the Module Catalogue hyperlinks are not provided).

Associated costs can be found on the Study tab for each module listed in the Module Catalogue (please note most of the module content applies to 2022/23 year of study). Information about module department specific costs should be considered in conjunction with the more general costs below:

• Core text books
• Printer credits
• Dissertation binding
• Robe hire for your degree ceremony

Scholarships and bursaries

How to apply

Applications are now open for courses that start in September and October 2025.

Applications will close on 2 August 2025 for students who require a visa to study in the UK, to allow time to receive a CAS and complete the visa application process.

How to apply for a postgraduate taught course