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| 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.
