BA (Hons) Theatre and Professional Practice

“Desperate times call for desperate measures”.  

There’s a lot of truth to that idiom as the film on this page will illustrate. When the UK lockdown happened on 23rd March 2020, our final year theatre students were four weeks away from performing their final pieces (FMP).

 We all knew that there was a possibility that the university would have to close in the weeks preceding the government announcement. When the inevitable shutdown happened, our students drifted off, many returning to their home countries without being able to complete and stage their work. What should have been our busy festival period fizzled out with hushed goodbyes in rehearsal rooms and tearful farewells in empty corridors. 

This film is intended to be a celebration of our students and their time here on the course. A call was put out for students to be interviewed via Zoom about their final theatre pieces, memories of their time at university and to tell us the stories about their final weeks of rehearsals and their subsequent life in quarantine. Those that had access to a decent internet connection responded and many others dredged their archives for short clips of rehearsals, field trips and past performances in order to construct this film.  

They’re a lively (and talkative) bunch which is why this final film is 57 minutes long. We hope you find their stories interesting, funny and, inevitably a bit sad as they talk about the highs (and lows) of their three years with us. We hope that you get a sense of how much fun these young people were to work with for three years, how sad we are as a staff team that we could not celebrate with them their final work and how much we miss being in their company. We hope this will stand as a tribute to their hard work, their sense of humour, their energy and intelligence. We know that this is not the ‘full stop’ to their artistic journey but merely a comma. We know that when this pandemic leaves us these young artists will resume their journeys and will resume their artistic journeys to make vibrant, exciting and original theatre.