BA (Hons) Drama

Terry

Hello, my name is Terry and I have just completed my third and final year of my BA (Hons) Drama degree. Two words to sum up my whole degree would be exciting and wonderful. I have really enjoyed my time as a Drama student at Greenwich for many reasons. The main reason is the people I met, I found myself socialising with people I wouldn’t usually socialise with so it was nice to meet loads of new people who are now some of my closest friends. The second aspect of the degree that I have really enjoyed is the modules I completed.

In first year my favourite module was Making Theatre, this is where we learned about all the other aspects of putting on a show such as lighting, sound, set, costume, stage managing, props etc. In the first term we would learn all the tricks of the trade and then in second term we would be split up and we would be assigned a job role to work on one of the third year final performance. The role I was given was Stage Manager for a production of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich by Bertolt Brecht, I absolutely loved the job role and tasks I were given. Just as a quick insight, the Stage Manager is the person who organises the crew and makes sure they know what they’re doing.

Other modules I completed in first year were Early Stages: Theatre, Carnival and Community, where we learnt about theatre from Ancient Greece to seventeenth century England with a main focus on how theatre was made and how it was created for the community who watched it. In this module we looked at plays such as Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare and Antigone by Sophocles. I also did Introduction to Film Making, which is exactly that, we learnt how to make our own short films which was very new to me but fun and exciting. The final first year module was Writing for Stage and Screen, in this course we spent the first term learning how to write for stage with a final script submission and then in the second term we learnt how to write for screen and had to follow it up with a screenplay submission. In term 3 we then had to pick either stage or screen and write our final project either as a play script or a screenplay.

In second year we had four different modules again, but they were very different to the modules in first year. One of our core modules was Modern Stages, this was a follow on from Early Stages, we picked up where we left off and looked into the transition into naturalism in the form of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Other plays included Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht, Cloud9 by Caryl Churchill and Angels in America by Tony Kushner. My favourite plays of the module were Cloud9 and Angels in America. Other modules in the first year were Physical Theatre and the Body, which is basically a course full of jumping around and being physical, it was so much fun. We also did Applied Drama where we learnt about the different types of Drama outside of the natural theatre space such as Reminiscence Theatre (theatre for old people), SEN (Special Educational Needs), Theatre in Prisons, Museum Theatre and Forum Theatre. It was really exciting learning about all the different forms of drama that can be used to help people from different lifestyles and backgrounds.

The final course was Theatre Studies which was one of my favourite modules; it was split into four different sectors of theatre. Eco-Critical Theatre looking at Lungs by Duncan Macmillan and The Contingency Plan by Steve Waters’. The second segment was Theatre Criticism where we looked at Harold Pinter’s Moonlight, Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children and Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice. The third part was Women’s Plays since 2000 looking at plays such as Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far! Debbie Tucker Green’s Born Bad, Laura Wade’s Breathing Corpses and a few more. The final segment looked at Revenge Tragedies where we once again looked at Shakespeare in the form of Hamlet. We also looked at plays such as ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Revenger’s Tragedy and White Devil.

Before I knew it I was in third year and one step away from completing my degree. In my final year, once again we had four modules; these were Work Placement, Other Stages, Contemporary British Theatre and Drama Production. I’ll start with Work Placement, for this course we had to find our own 100 hour work placement; I found this course quite hard to manage with my other modules as well as my other job, but it worked out fine in the end. My second module was Other Stages, this course was split into two sections which were called ‘Avant Garde Theatre’ and ‘African Theatre and Performance’. I enjoyed Avant Garde more as it was ‘freer’ and you covered a lot more in terms of theatre.

The third module was Contemporary British Theatre where we looked at plays such as A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, Saved by Edward Bond, Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London, Laura Wade’s Posh and about thirteen more. This was my favourite module of my final year as I learned so much about different playwrights and different styles of writing.

The final module we did was Drama Production. This module began with some of the class pitching plays they wanted to direct, I was one of them and pitched the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco. After this, four of the directors got picked and then the rest of the year had to audition for which play they wanted to be in. After this I was given a cast of nine lovely people and from then on the play was born. I was so lucky as my play got picked to be performed at Greenwich Theatre which was very exciting and an amazing opportunity.

Overall I would say my experience at Greenwich has been such a good mix of theory and performance and I have loved every bit of it.