Acting for Contemporary Theatre

Acting for contemporary theatre is a discipline that takes the full complexity of the modern stage as its context. Contemporary theatre is a broad and varied field: it encompasses new writing, site-specific performance, physical theatre, verbatim work, immersive experiences, and devised ensemble practice alongside the more traditional forms of text-based production. Training as an actor for this landscape requires not just technical skill but creative versatility, intellectual curiosity about the purposes of performance, and the ability to collaborate effectively with directors, writers and fellow performers.

At the University of Chichester this three-year full-time programme is highly practical in its orientation. You will spend substantial time in the studio and rehearsal room, developing your acting technique alongside skills in directing, playwriting and workshop leading. As the course description notes, the programme is explicitly about developing skills, ideas and experiences to prepare you for a career in the theatre industry, and the breadth of the training reflects the range of roles that working theatre practitioners occupy.

You will not simply train as a performer; you will develop the understanding of the whole creative process that makes an actor a more resourceful and collaborative artist.

The programme develops your physical and vocal technique, your ability to analyse and respond to text, your capacity to devise original material and your skills as a facilitator and leader of creative processes. These capacities are valuable both on stage and in the applied theatre contexts where trained practitioners increasingly work.

Graduates pursue careers in professional theatre as actors, directors, devisers, workshop leaders and theatre educators. Many work in applied and community theatre, in schools, health settings and community organisations, where the ability to lead creative processes is as important as performance skill. Some move into related fields including casting, arts administration and creative producing.

Postgraduate training in acting, directing or applied theatre is also a well-established next step.