MFA Playwriting

Our two-year MFA gives you the opportunity to launch your career as a playwright with a full run in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Overview

This course has been launched to extend a great opportunity for trainee playwrights.

Working in the heart of the festival city, there will be time to work with actors on all years of the BA Acting & English and the BA Acting for Stage & Screen courses.

You will be working in a variety of ways alongside trainee directors to workshop and stage new work.

You'll have dedicated, industry-recognised mentors providing support throughout your training time and you’ll be studying in one of the most culturally vibrant cities in the world.

The two-year duration gives you time to truly develop skills and creativity, and also allows you to network and build relationships with actors and directors who can make an impact on your career after you graduate.

Course details

We believe that there is no standard approach to the training of playwrights. The art is a combination of creative, textual, and communicative acuity and every writer is unique. For that reason the course is designed to be individually responsive to each student’s interests and experience. Most modules are heavily mentor-based, which means that you always have advice, expertise, and guidance on hand as you explore your artistic potential.

Assessments

The majority of your assessments are based on a variety of writing challenges that aim to help you develop scripts of various lengths, all of which will have been supported by tutorials which provide feedback as your work. Many of your writing projects will be seen in performance.

Careers

While we can’t predict the future, we can be certain that an ever-expanding range of entertainment platforms will require an ever-expanding range of content. We believe that writers trained in the core skills of good story-telling, creating compelling and engaging characters and dialogue, finding a variety of ways to adapt their work to different contexts and media, and understanding a variety of marketing possibilities will mean that the writers will be able to adapt their work to a variety of platforms.

This course aims to train such graduates, who can see unlimited potential and a variety of opportunities for themselves in many areas of the entertainment and writing/publishing industries.