BA (Hons) Theatre and Creative Writing

Lancaster's degree in Theatre and Creative Writing is taught jointly by the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) and the Department of English and Creative Writing. It combines the study of Theatre with the writing of original and imaginative fiction, poetry or plays. These two different focuses reinforce and complement each other.

Studying Theatre at Lancaster gives you the opportunity to learn about innovative twentieth and twenty-first century theatre and performance through an exciting and varied mix of practical and academic approaches. You will be taught by internationally esteemed, award winning theatre practitioners and scholars and will gain critical and creative skills that open up possibilities for working in theatre, while making you attractive to a wide range of other employers.

Your Creative Writing courses are taught by a team of widely published authors through a combination of lectures, readings, practice and discussion in regular tutor-led workshops. Your degree includes an Introduction to Creative Writing in your first year, and in your second and third years of study you will choose additional genre-specific units such as Short Fiction, Poetry Writing or Creative Non-fiction.

You will begin your degree with core courses including, an Introduction to Theatre Studies and Creative Writing. In your second year you’ll move on to subjects such as Theatre Techniques, Performance Composition, Work Placement, Intermediate Creative Writing and Critical Reflections. You will then complete your degree by choosing from a selection of Theatre and Creative Writing modules on offer including a final year theatre production module.

You also have the opportunity to spend your second year abroad at one of our partner universities in North America or Australia. The year abroad counts fully towards your Lancaster degree.

Careers

A Theatre and Creative Writing degree gives graduates the capability to work independently and collaboratively in a wide range of professions. Our graduates have become professional performers, choreographers, dramaturgs, technicians, directors and published novelists, poets and playwrights; community artists; administrators and producers of arts events; and therapists, teachers, lecturers and researchers.

You will also be able to develop key transferable skills, such as creative thinking, communication, project design and group management, as well as research, analysis, and critical writing. These skills will make you extremely attractive to a wide range of employers, including those within the different creative and cultural industries which now forms a large part of the UK’s economy. In addition, you will gain invaluable qualities such as a sharp kinaesthetic and literary intelligence, honed through constant creative practice and academic analysis, which will enable you to respond to any situation with far greater clarity and confidence that would otherwise have been possible.

Many of our Theatre and Creative Writing graduates progress to postgraduate degrees, to become academics, lecturers and teachers, whilst others train further in performance or creative writing.