The MA/MFA Performance is an exciting master's program that offers a practical, versatile, and interdisciplinary approach to performance-making and training. The program provides students with an advanced and practical understanding of current performance practices, drawing on a broad range of artistic and theoretical influences.

Theatre for Young Audiences is a practical training program for performers and makers from a range of disciplines, that explores approaches to making work for, by, and with children and young people. Underpinning the course is the ambition to define Theatre for Young Audiences as a cutting-edge arts practice, outside (or perhaps alongside) the Applied Theatre framing that so often dominates this area of training, encouraging co-creative processes that balance the sensibilities of the adult artist and the creative voice of children and young people.

MA Musical Theatre: Acting and Performance Our MA Musical Theatre: Acting and Performance course is an intensive, one-year training program designed around the key musical theatre skills of acting, singing, and dance/movement. At the heart of the course is a focus on acting skills for musical theatre both in sung and spoken text.

This course is the only postgraduate program in the world that takes candidates through a course of study that culminates in their receiving Designated Linklater Teacher status along with the MFA degree. A deep dive into the Linklater Voice method is the foundation of the MFA. The program was designed in close collaboration with Ms. Linklater and reflects her ideas of what a twenty-first-century postgraduate course for actor-teachers should look like. It is, in part, a voice-centred actor-training, rooted in Linklater’s approach to voice as fundamental to a whole system.

Developed and led by renowned Actor Musician Jeremy Harrison, this vocational program builds on and extends the work developed on the College’s ground-breaking BA (Hons) Actor Musicianship program, drawing on our strong links to theatre-makers, directors, choreographers, writers, musical directors and performers involved in the development of this innovative area of theatre practice.

This course draws on the influential theories and techniques of the great French acting teacher Michel Saint-Denis, training the expressive body, voice and imagination. Working with some of the greatest dramatic texts ever written students are asked to consider what they mean now. Four key periods of innovation and transition in Western theatre are examined: Greek Tragedy, Clowning and Commedia dell’arte, Shakespeare and the English Renaissance and Stanislavski. Students are encouraged to understand the demands of both art and craft, as participants in, and practitioners of, these theatrical traditions.

MA Acting - Contemporary combines teaching in voice, movement and acting techniques with an exploration of some of the key playwrights who have helped forge the canon of Western theatre, including the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, Chekhov, Beckett and Kane. Uniquely, it explores the relationship between the two artists at the core of much Western theatre: the actor and the writer. On this course, plays are frequently developed in collaboration and students are encouraged to explore their role as creative artists. There will be a chance to work with, and alongside, established playwrights as well as students on Central’s MA Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media.

The MA/MFA Actor/Performer Training is a practice-based program for those seeking intensive advanced training as actors and performers alongside rigorous academic study and performance research. The program focuses specifically on actor/performer training, theatre creation, performative writing, informed critical reflection, and practice research.

Students will build on their existing skills and focus on specific needs. Drawing on the expertise of Central’s staff and professionals from the industry, this course aims to develop highly-skilled actors with the ability to work across all performance mediums, specializing in screen. Acting and movement classes will interrogate the body, and there is a specific focus on relaxing and working with ease, developing the imagination, unpicking personal habits and creating believable performances. Voice and dialect classes will encourage an understanding of the voice as an instrument. Students will work with a variety of texts, including classical and contemporary material.

This course does not train actors, but develops a practical understanding of what it is to act, enabling graduates to work as actor trainers and coaches, drama and theatre practitioners, and directors of actors. Students are introduced to the principles and practices behind the training, education and support of actors and performers developing their practice. Teaching methods include tutorials, group seminars and workshops. Practical sessions are designed to enhance understanding of acting processes and skills in pedagogy, together with associated study of contemporary issues of performance including theatre, film and television.

The ArtsEd MA Acting course offers rigorous and intensive vocational actor training that enables you to harness your potential as a highly skilled, creative and autonomous actor.

Voice Studies courses at Central are nationally and internationally renowned, giving a specialised education in the study and practice of the spoken voice. These courses are for graduates of appropriate disciplines who wish to follow a career in voice teaching and who seek specialised study and practice in voice and speech.