Theatre Directing

MFA Theatre Directing

Full-Time Programme

The Master of Fine Arts in Theatre Directing is intended to provide its students with the opportunity to acquire a practical training and education that can enable them to become professional theatre directors. It offers an integrated programme of professional practice and theoretical, critical and contextual study, allowing its students to acquire a comprehensive practice-based awareness of the work and functions of the professional theatre director under current conditions.

The Course has been developed through close co-operation between Birkbeck College and the National Council for Drama Training, which is the body charged by the theatre industry with overseeing and safeguarding professional theatre training provision and standards for actors, stage managers and technicians in the UK. The Course, and NCDT's new responsibility for director training, has been developed in collaboration with a large number of professional theatre directors and other experienced professional practitioners. The Course is intended to realise the industry's long-maintained aspirations for a professionally acceptable directing course, as recommended by two major Gulbenkian Reports in 1989 and 1995. These Reports believed that such a course should:

• Be at postgraduate level.
• Derive from a collaboration between the university, drama school and professional theatre sectors; and
• Incorporate a meaningful amount of work for the student with professional actors in a professional context.

The design of this Course incorporates these specific points and very many others contained within the two Reports.

Special features of the Course include:

• A six-month industrial secondment to a professional theatre company or companies.
• Specific production opportunities under professional conditions within that secondment.
• An extended mentoring relationship between the student and a professional director centring on that professional secondment.
• An opportunity for the student to establish a relationship with a professional drama school offering a course or courses accredited by NCDT.
• Regular observation of the Course by a highly experienced group of professional directors under the umbrella of NCDT.
• Participation in the teaching of the Course by a substantial number of experienced theatre practitioners.