King's College London

This programme provides students with the opportunity to study theatre, performance, and related cultural practices in a dynamic intellectual community in the heart of London. It combines critical theory, creative inquiry, and interdisciplinary research across contemporary theatre, live art, cultural tourism, experimental choreography, and political performance.

Students examine how performance engages with wider social, political, and environmental contexts, developing self-reflexive critical and performative writing practices. Core themes include capitalism and crisis, race and gender theory, trans politics, sustainability, and the climate emergency, reflecting the programme’s strong ethical and political commitments.

Through the cross-faculty network Performance@King’s, students engage with performance across diverse disciplines such as War Studies, Cultural Media, and Modern Languages. Students also have the option to take Performance Lab, a practice-based module with guest artists, to develop their own creative work.

A 15,000-word dissertation, supported by the Research Methods and Practice module, enables students to conduct advanced independent research. This programme is ideal for students who have recently completed a BA in Theatre, Performance Studies, Comparative Literature, English, journalism, or related fields, and/or spent time engaging in critical performance practices or work in related industries (museums, festival planning, etc.). The programme prepares graduates for careers in the arts and cultural sectors - including curation, production, dramaturgy, journalism, and arts management - as well as for further academic or professional research.

Course essentials
This master’s blends theatre and performance studies with a focus on critical culture to examine the contexts and material conditions within which performances take place. You’ll explore how to engage with questions of subject position and identity politics through the arts of writing and performance, considering how contemporary critical practice expands your own experience of theatricality and creative engagement.

Your first required module in the Theatre, Performance and Critical Culture MA will trace the genealogies of critical theory. It gives you a solid grounding in the language and methodologies of this field, which you can think through as you make your own laboratory work and write up your Dissertation in the second semester.

The other required module mobilises London as its classroom to consider the myriad ways the capital operates as a place of performance. You will visit theatres and attend performances as a peer group, but you will also consider the Royal Courts of Justice, London’s Art Galleries, the Kew Botanical Gardens and the Freud Museum as sites of performance with their own histories.

By selecting two optional modules, you can further shape your MA in Theatre, Performance and Critical Culture. The Performance Lab, which most students enrol for, develops your practice-based research skills. It gives you a chance to design an individual performance project on a theme of your own choosing, whether exploring your own first language and its traditions within theatre, choreography and image, staging scenes drawn from your own experience of London, or addressing critical concerns that shape your sense of what politics might be. You will then produce a written analysis and evaluation of your experience working with creative experimentation and theoretical argument.

Other optional modules include the chance to use place as the critical lens through which to explore recent Shakespeare productions, learn how to use the body as a way of studying early modern society and culture, or examine the urban realm as a platform and site for the staging of protest and politics in the city.

You’ll complete your master’s in Theatre, Performance and Critical Culture with a dissertation. Before you tackle this, you’ll be prepared with a module on research methods and practices that will introduce you to current conversations in English studies and theatre and performance studies, affect theory, urban studies, and theatre-friendly critical approaches such as phenomenology and semiotics. Through a series of workshops, seminars and one-on-one supervision, you’ll gain an introduction to advanced research methods and start to prepare your dissertation project. You’ll then get to present some aspect of your project at a peer-group curated conference and creative colloquium. The year is rounded off with a creative celebration and dinner/workshop with guest artists.