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What makes English Literature and Theatre, Acting & Performance at Worcester special?

Studied in combination, English Literature and Theatre, Acting & Performance provide an opportunity to develop your practical experience of making and presenting theatre alongside wider academic study of plays and other literature. You’ll analyse prose and plays and use your in-depth understanding of their concepts and themes to shape your own performances.

The joint honours course combines theoretical and practical approaches to provide a comprehensive learning experience, supported by specialist staff with years of experience. Students graduate with a range of skills relevant to roles across multiple creative and communication industries.

Overview

Overview

Key features

  • Strong emphasis on the development of advanced literacy and communication skills
  • Very stimulating and motivating course
  • Theatre, Acting & Performance element predominantly taught in two state-of-the-art drama studios, fully equipped with lighting, sound, video and projection facilities
  • Study diverse literatures emanating from the sixteenth through to the twenty-first centuries, encompassing both 'canonical' and 'marginal' texts
  • Earn-as-You-Learn opportunities
  • Opportunities to play an active role in local and regional literature festivals, related events and a work project module
  • Tailor your course to your individual needs with a joint honours degree
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Joint 10th for Graduate Prospects in the UK

Our English courses are joint 10th for Graduate Prospects in the UK (The Complete University Guide 2024.)

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Entry requirements

Entry requirements

104
UCAS tariff points

Entry requirements

104 UCAS Tariff points

T Levels may be used to meet the entry tariff requirements for this course. Find out more about T levels as UCAS tariff points here.

Other information

If you have any questions about entry requirements, please contact the Admissions Office on 01905 855111 or email admissions@worc.ac.uk for advice.

Further information about the UCAS Tariff can be obtained from the UCAS website.

Laura Kane

Laura Kane - Loving Life In La La Land

Many aspiring actors grow up dreaming of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. From Sunset Strip to the Santa Monica Pier and the Griffith Observatory, the landmarks of Los Angeles are immortalised in our minds by the movies, mapping out a land full of adventure and possibility.

But dreams can come true, and for University of Worcester graduate Laura Kane, Hollywood Boulevard and Venice Beach are no longer the names of exotic locations thousands of miles away, but rather a new home where she is building a successful career as an actor.

Read the full story

Throughout my studies I always felt supported by academic staff who were encouraging, responsive and passionate about their subjects.

Toni Brookes, English Literature Graduate

Course content

Course content

Our courses are informed by research and current developments in the discipline and feedback from students, external examiners and employers. Modules do therefore change periodically in the interests of keeping the course relevant and reflecting best practice. The most up-to-date information will be available to you once you have accepted a place and registered for the course. If there are insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, this might not be offered, but we will advise you as soon as possible and help you choose an alternative. 

Year 1

Mandatory

  • Devising and Physical Theatre
  • Plays in Performance
  • Literary Forms and Genres
  • Ways of Reading, Ways of Writing
  • Writing Worcester Past and Present

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Year 2

Mandatory

  • Exploding the Canon: Literary Theory and Practice
  • Acting for Stage, Screen & Media

 

Optional

  • Directed Public Performance
  • Creative Movement Practices
  • Applied Theatre Practices
  • Performance & Digital Media
  • Playwriting
  • Musical Theatre
  • Movement and Migration
  • Politics, Sex and Identity in the Early Modern World
  • Shakespeare: Stage, Page and Screen
  • Gothic and Romantic Literature
  • Spaces of Modernity
  • Children’s Literature
  • Work Project

 

Year 3

Mandatory

  • Independent Research Project or Final Performance Project

 

 

Optional

  • Professional Practice with Placement
  • Theatre & Disability
  • Queer Theatre & Performance
  • Theatre & Education
  • Immersive & Site-responsive Performance
  • Writing for Performance
  • Advanced Acting Practices
  • Staging Shakespeare Today
  • Justice and Revenge: from Tragedy to the Western
  • Postcolonial Encounters
  • Writing and the Environment
  • War and Conflict
  • Gendering Voices
  • Partnerships and Rivalries
  • Literatures and Cultures: International Explorations
  • Queer Bodies, Queer Texts
  • Literature and Culture – Local Heritage

 

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Joint Honours

Discover our full range of joint degrees and read about how your degree will be structured.

Find out more about studying a joint honours course
Teaching and assessment

Teaching and assessment

All Theatre, Acting & Performance modules are 'practice-based' (i.e. you learn primarily through participation in performance). All students have opportunities to direct, write, devise and design performance work. Alongside, you examine the cultural contexts of drama and the theories that have spurred its development and informed how we understand it.

There are opportunities to explore the diverse 'applications' of drama (in TV, live theatre, film and online), its social and historical significance, and its community roles and roles in education. Leading theatre companies and practitioners regularly visit to work with students, to provide workshops and to grow your understanding of the profession in support of your employability. Recent visitors have included Punchdrunk, Stan's Café, Idle Motion, Shared Experience and award-winning children's dramatist, David Wood. The course explicitly addresses the needs of students who, on graduating, are interested in theatre (performance, technical theatre, writing, directing, theatre/arts administration) or in teaching, theatre-in-education, youth theatre or community theatre. Students are regularly involved in public performance and the course's networks of professional and community contacts generate numerous opportunities for 'earn while you learn' paid work.

English Literature provides opportunities to explore literatures from the 16th to 21st centuries, embracing both mainstream, 'canonical' and less familiar, 'marginal' texts. It invites you to share with your lecturers cutting-edge thinking in spheres as diverse as Shakespeare in performance, children's literature, contemporary American writing and ecocriticism (the understanding of literary texts through exploration of the interconnections between human culture and organic and animal worlds).

From the outset, you will develop skills of close and creative reading, as well as a critical awareness of the relationship between texts and their contexts. Increasingly as the course progresses, you will explore literature from a range of theoretical perspectives current throughout the humanities. This, in turn, will support you to specialise in the areas of literature that interest you most. There are also opportunities to explore relationships between literature and other kinds of expression, for example painting and illustration.

For more information about teaching, learning and assessment on this course, please see the single honours course pages for English Literature BA (Hons) and Theatre, Acting & Performance BA (Hons).

Programme specification

For comprehensive details on the aims and intended learning outcomes of the course, and the means by which these are achieved through learning, teaching and assessment, please download the latest English Literature programme specification and Theatre, Acting & Performance programme specification documents.

Meet the team

You will be taught by a teaching team whose expertise and knowledge are closely matched to the content of the modules on the course

 

 

 

Alison Reeves

Alison Reeves

Alison Reeves’ main teaching specialisms are Applied Theatre and Theatre in Education.

Her most recent productions are an updated version of Euripides’ The Trojan Women and an adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories which toured to local arts venues with invited primary school audiences.

Dr Lucy Arnold

Dr Lucy Arnold is a specialist in Contemporary literature, with particular research interests in contemporary gothic, narratives of haunting, contemporary women’s writing and psychoanalytic criticism. Her teaching experience spans a wide range of periods and genres but focusses on twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Her published work to date has concerned the writing of Booker Prize winning novelist Hilary Mantel, with her monograph, Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades, published with Bloomsbury in 2019.

Dr Jane George

Dr Jane George

Jane George's teaching and research interests focus upon devising and contemporary performance, particularly site-related performance. She is also interested in interdisciplinary practice, particularly performance writing and multi-media performance.

Jane has worked professionally as a director, writer and dramaturg and continues to develop her creative practice in collaboration with a number of performance companies and practitioners including contemporary performance company Reckless Sleepers, choreographer Lizie Giraudeau (formerly of Siobhan Davies Dance Company) and Pegasus Theatre, Oxford.

Jane is Course Leader for the MT Masters in Touring Theatre 

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Dr Daniel Somerville

Daniel Somerville is an artist practitioner, senior lecturer and practice researcher. His research interests are in the fields of performance, theatre, gender and opera studies, with particular focus on the concept of the ‘operatic’ and how it manifests in terms of movement, performance practice and convention, and how this may be applied to contemporary performance making. As an artist practitioner he has choreographed, directed and performed nationally (including at Edinburgh Fringe, The Place, Chisenhale Dance Space and Duckie in London, and for Birmingham Rep) and internationally (including National Theatre Namibia, Market Theatre - Johannesburg, Liberdade Provisoria - Lisbon and on a tour of the Czech Republic).

Previous academic positions include as a research assistant and visiting tutor at Goldsmiths (BA and MA students), as a visiting lecturer at Laban (MA students), as visiting lecturer and mentor (BA students) at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and as a visiting lecturer at University of Wolverhampton (BA and MA students), and as an online tutor in Opera Studies at Rose Bruford.

Claire Cochrane profile image

Professor Claire Cochrane

Claire's teaching and research interests range very widely, reflecting her commitment to the creative and social value of all aspects of contemporary theatre practice. As the former Head of Theatre and Performance, she has laid the foundations for the current strengths of the undergraduate courses in public performance, applied theatre and real-world  engagement in the workplace. As a researcher, Claire has published very widely on different aspects of  twentieth and twenty first century theatre practices and audiences right across the UK. 

Ildiko Rippel

Dr Ildikó Rippel

Ildikó is a performer, writer and lecturer. She is co-founder and artistic director of Anglo-German performance company Zoo Indigo, devising autobiographical performance that engages with social and political themes of gender, cultural identity, displacement and migration. Zoo Indigo’s work combines dark humour, song and multimedia in a postmodern and kaleidoscopic approach, producing politically charged performances. 

Ildikó has recently completed a Practice as Research PhD at Lancaster University, examining maternal performance and the presence of family members in contemporary theatre. Her current practice research with Zoo Indigo investigates multilingualism and dramaturgies of migration

Ildikó previously worked as a lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester (Drama and Performing Arts) and at Nottingham Trent University International College (Art and Design), and as an elf in a Santa's Grotto.

Professor Nicoleta Cinpoes, Head of English, Media & Culture

Professor Nicoleta Cinpoes

Nicoleta Cinpoes joined the University of Worcester in 2007. She teaches Renaissance Literature, is International Exchanges Liaison for the School of Humanities and co-director of Worcester's Early Modern Research Group.

She has edited Doing Kyd: A Collection of Critical Essays on the Spanish Tragedy for Manchester University Press (2016) and is currently collaborating on a new Romanian translation of Shakespeare's complete works, writing introductions to Hamlet (2010), Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice and The Comedy of Errors.

Dr David Arnold, Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Dr David Arnold

David Arnold trained as a Classicist before moving on to doctoral work on twentieth-century American poetry. His research and teaching interests lie in poetry, American literature, ecocriticism and narrative criticism. He has published articles on the literary improvisations of William Carlos Williams and a book on American poetry: Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal (Liverpool University Press, 2007). His recent work focuses on ecophenomenological readings of modernist writing, and Buddhist American Poetry.

David teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and has responsibility for modules in Literary Theory and American Writing. David is a member of both the British Association of American Studies and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He is also a member of the Green Voices Research Group.

Dr Sharon Young

Dr Sharon Young is a  Fellow of the HEA and her teaching interests include, Renaissance, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, women's poetry, and literary theory.

Sharon's research focuses mainly on women's poetry of the early modern period, Renaissance revenge tragedy and women's manuscript culture. Sharon has published on female poets and the critical debates of the early eighteenth century and Mary Leapor. 

Dr Whitney Standlee, Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Dr Whitney Standlee

Dr Whitney Standlee is a specialist in literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular research interests in Irish women’s writing and migrant literature. Her publications include two recent books on the subject of Irish women’s writing.

Whitney teaches on a range of core and elective modules at all levels, all of which deal at least in part with nineteenth- and early twentieth century literature.

Careers

Careers

Employability

There are excellent career opportunities for Theatre, Acting and Performance graduates. These are both in drama-related areas, such as theatre, education, and the media, and in a wide range of other fields of employment made accessible through skills learned on the course in presentation, performance, critical thinking and writing, creativity, confidence and communication. Former students often set up their own businesses, for example as small scale touring theatre companies or drama education providers. Past students are now working as actors, producers, stage managers and directors for employers across the areas of theatre, TV, radio and film. Teaching and lecturing are very popular career choices for our graduates, as are arts administration and marketing.

Many English Literature graduates will take a fourth year postgraduate Certificate in Education before entering the teaching profession. Other students will take a certificate in TEFL and become teachers of English as a second language at home or abroad. Those graduates who achieve particularly good results in their first degree will choose to progress to a Masters course, which will then often lead to a career as a researcher or further study to PhD. Many students progress to careers requiring good communication skills such as Public Relations or develop research careers with media or publishing companies. Throughout our English Literature degrees, there is a focus on developing employability which includes attractive opportunities for work experience on an optional work project module. Students are also strongly encouraged to take up the opportunity to study abroad for a semester.

 

 

 

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Careers and Employability

Our Graduates pursue exciting and diverse careers in a wide variety of employment sectors.

Find out how we can support you to achieve your potential
Costs

Fees and funding

Full-time tuition fees

UK and EU students

The standard fee for full-time home and EU undergraduate students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the 2024/25 academic year is £9,250 per year.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

International students

The standard tuition fee for full-time international students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the 2024/25 academic year is £16,200 per year.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

Part-time tuition fees

UK and EU students

The standard tuition fees for part-time UK and EU students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the academic year 2024/25 are £1,156 per 15-credit module, £1,542 per 20-credit module, £2,312 per 30-credit module, £3,083 per 40-credit module, £3,469 per 45-credit module and £4,625 per 60 credit module.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

Additional costs

Every course has day-to-day costs for basic books, stationery, printing and photocopying. The amounts vary between courses.

If your course offers a placement opportunity, you may need to pay for an Enhanced Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) check.

Accommodation

Finding the right accommodation is paramount to your university experience. Our halls of residence are home to friendly student communities, making them great places to live and study.

We have over 1,000 rooms across our range of student halls. With rooms to suit every budget and need, from our 'Traditional Hall' at £131 per week to 'En-suite Premium' at £221 per week (2024/25 prices).

For full details visit our accommodation page.

How to apply

How to apply

Part-time applications

If you would like to apply to study this course part time, please complete our online application form.

 

 

 

Applying through UCAS

English Literature BA (Hons) and Theatre, Acting & Performance - WQ43

UCAS is the central organisation through which applications are processed for entry onto full-time undergraduate courses in Higher Education in the UK.

Read our How to apply pages for more information on applying and to find out what happens to your application.

 

 

 

UCAS Code

WQ43

Get in touch

If you have any questions, please get in touch. We're here to help you every step of the way.

 

Dr Jane George

Course contact

Dr Sharon Young

Admissions tutor