The course literature from the University of Nottingham’s MA in Performance Practices describes dramaturgy as “a multi-skilled practice which allows the practitioner to put research skills to practical use in the environment of professional theatre" (italics mine).  Only two of the courses surveyed saw dramaturgy as lying outside the context of theatre institutions (particularly mainstream theatre) and the associated script-led working methods. These will be examined towards the end of this article.

Dramaturgy on university curricula is related to what is thought to constitute the job of a dramaturg.  In the UK, as opposed to North America, Canada and Europe, there is still very little name recognition associated with the job title ‘dramaturg’.  Consequently, the time has yet to come when hordes of school-leavers compete to become dramaturgs rather than performers or directors.  Our version – or at least nearest equivalent – of the dramaturg is perhaps the Literary Manager. Though more familiar, it is a term that perhaps lacks the allure of the more traditional creative roles - performer, director, designer, playwright.   At the short-lived ‘Literary Managers on the Fringe’ project in 1997 [2] predominant concerns were balancing the conflicting needs of programming for the theatre (and associated issues of policy and funding) with a sense of duty to those playwrights who send scripts in “on spec.”  In other words, it is conceived primarily as a servicing and facilitating role.  

Literary management may well have gained both status and recognition with the rise of New Writing in the 1990s. Evidence of this, noted by Lloyd Trott (RADA and Visiting Tutor at Goldsmiths), is a trend whereby literary managers are now starting to come to the job from directing, rather than the other way round.   Literary management is now not necessarily seen as a stopgap or foot-in-the-door for aspiring directors looking for their first play.   However, it is probably still fair to say that compared to the more so-called creative roles, it represents a safe bet – a relatively secure, paid, desk job.

Whatever the differences in job description and allure between the literary manager and the dramaturg, the terms are pretty much synonymous in the UK. This fact is reflected in those academic institutions where ‘Dramaturgy’ courses in fact constitute training for literary management and associated fields such as educational or outreach work.  The prime example of this is the new BA (Hons) Dramaturgy offered at Bretton Hall/ University of Leeds. This is the most recently set-up dramaturgy course and the only one at undergraduate level.

The BA (Hons) Dramaturgy was created this year out of the BA (Hons) Theatre Arts (Dramaturgy), which saw its first intake in the academic year 1998-1999. The new course claims to examine "the traditional skills of the dramaturg in preparing playtexts and source materials for rehearsal and performance" in practical contexts and collaboration with students on other programmes. This is set within a contextual framework of historical and theoretical ideas. The new title has been accompanied by a vast increase in student numbers, going from around twenty-five in 1998-1999 to fifty-four in the current academic year. However, it is not clear whether this recent popularity is due to the greater prominence of the term 'dramaturgy' in the course title.

Ruth Fisher, a second-year student on the original course, was attracted its breadth and the opportunities to gain practical experience on theatre productions both on campus and in the outside field - something that, she hopes, will help her decide which particular area of theatre practice she will want to pursue as a career. At the time of entering the course, she was unaware of the term 'dramaturg' and, although one of her placements is as an assistant dramaturg, she does not see this as a suitable career choice. "Literary management is really being pushed," she says, and this is reflected in the significant proportion of teaching dedicated to script analysis (in particular exploring the relationship of the contemporary social and cultural context to a particular play-script) in the first year and to what they have coined as "pre-formance": research and other preparatory work prior to taking a play into rehearsal.

What is surprising is that this institution, known until recently for offering one of the few BA courses in devised theatre, concentrates in its taught elements on the analysis of play-scripts and on script-led creative processes. Opportunities for alternative practices may occur in the placements, and this year the students were visited by Forced Entertainment and introduced to some of their working methods, but, as Ruth stated, opportunities like this are "more of a fluke". The publicity of the newly title course suggests that, as with its former incarnation, great importance is placed on its students gaining industry skills and going on to jobs in the field. Making professional contacts is high on the list of priorities.

This emphasis on gaining marketable skills and experience is fairly typical of courses that fall into the literary-management conception of ‘dramaturgy’.  A characteristic feature of this is the use of visiting professionals and particularly work-placements in local theatres.  The University of Nottingham takes this approach a stage further.  For their MA in Performance Practices, the Nottingham Playhouse takes on all the teaching for one of the four core modules, with a series of seminar discussions entitled ‘The Role of the Dramaturg’.  The course convenor, Dr Joe Townsend, claims that at the time of its inception, no other courses were exploring the term ‘dramaturg’ and that this was, in fact, one of the main motivations for setting up the module.  They chose to examine the term, not within the more theory-based modules (Performance Theories and Performance Analysis), but through close contact with a theatre that was itself looking into how a dramaturg could facilitate their programme of work.  The course also provides an opportunity for students to take their practical explorations of the term further in the Independent Project option (on the fourth Specialist Options module) through which they are involved in ‘real’ projects at the Playhouse.  Examples of past projects are: researching the cultural context of a programmed Steven Berkoff play and helping a stand-up comic shape his material into a two-hour monologue suitable for production.

The one-year MA was set up two years ago as a means of “marrying academic and theoretical study with practice”. The primary aim is to prepare students for practical employment in the theatre - “though students may chose to continue in education if they prefer the more theoretical side”.

The same sort of emphasis on marketable skills and experience can be found on courses and modules that offer similar content to those outlined above but are not actually entitled ‘Dramaturgy'.  One of these is the Literary Management Specialism on the BA Drama & Theatre Arts course offered at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh.  All students follow a broad-based programme, split evenly between critical/theoretical study and workshop-based practical work.  At the end of Level 2, they have a choice of specialist areas, including Literary Management, as well as Theatre Criticism, Community Theatre and the more usual areas of Playwriting, Directing and Producing – “I think at the moment we’re the only place offering named specialisms in Literary Management and Theatre Criticism to undergraduates in the UK,” says Course Leader, Dr. Barbara Bell. 

Dr. Bell identifies three areas of the literary manager’s job, and sees the literary management module as representing these in equal measure.  The three strands are: work pertaining to the programming elements of the role as it relates to extant plays (research, writing reports, selecting translations, editing, programming); work relating to audience and public relations (producing programme notes, teacher’s packs and so on - what Dr. Bell calls “bread and butter work”); and work on plays in progress and writer-development.   As with the courses outlined above, there is a strong emphasis throughout on giving students a sense of the career opportunities and the reality of work in its professional context.

The Literary Management and Theatre Criticism modules were created by Professor Ian Brown, and modelled on the work of the Eugene O’Neill Center in the US.   Something not specified by other course leaders interviewed for this article, but made explicit in the Edinburgh course, is an emphasis on personal development.   Dr. Bell describes her ideal Literary Management student as “endlessly curious about both the theatre and the world around them, imaginative, absolutely dependable, unflappable in a crisis, an intelligent listener and, when necessary, a good leader.” 

While Dr. Bell identifies three strands of literary management/dramaturgy, Lloyd Trott, tutor on the MA Text and Performance offered jointly by RADA and Kings College, University of London, sees the role as split between ‘desk’ dramaturgy (research, programme notes, work on translations) and ‘floor’ dramaturgy (work in developing a script for production, or, more often, work with the director in rehearsal). The MA, says Lloyd Trott, “screams to be called dramaturgy”. Besides a strong emphasis of dramaturgical analysis within the course (though the term is not explicitly used), current and ex-students also benefit from “lots of dramaturgy in the building” in the form of student-led workshops and play-readings.  The MA has been in existence for a number of years, but it is only just being recognised, internally at least, that this is the place to direct would-be dramaturgy students.  Trott cites as success stories Sarah Dickenson, who has worked at the National Theatre and is now at Writernet, and Diana Hytner, now Literary Manager at the New End Theatre, having worked with Max Stafford-Clark and Giles Croft.

Lloyd Trott is also responsible for an MA offer in ‘Dramaturgy’ available at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Although there was support and interest in dramaturgy within the department, the offer has so far been taken up by only one student. The student achieved her goal - employment as a dramaturg in her home country of Germany while avoiding the usual five-year training – but neither she nor Lloyd Trott were entirely satisfied by the experience. There were difficulties associated with the fact that she was the only student on a subject (she found it a rather isolated and disheartening experience).  For the first two terms she shared taught classes with students on the MA Writing for Performance and was not as prepared as she could have been for the work placements she was offered.

Of the tutors I spoke to for this article, Lloyd Trott was one of very few who distinguished, albeit in passing, between literary management and dramaturgy. In reflecting on ways of meeting both student and industry demands in this area, he explored the idea of formalising an MA at RADA whereby playwrights, literary managers and dramaturgs share a core course in what he calls ‘creative script analysis’ (reading plays for their dramaturgical possibilities, either towards improving the writing or as preparation for rehearsal) and experience of working with actors ‘on the floor’.   Specialisms in the different paths would then be achieved through work placements and both practical and written end-of-year projects.   He was careful, however, to state his belief that the increasing compartmentalisation of theatre disciplines is an unsound direction to go in: “I was pleased to hear Stephen Sondheim on Desert Island Discs, because he made the point that most writers are also actors and vice versa.”   The danger of specialisms, he believes, is that they create narrow, blinkered skill-led areas of expertise, whereas theatre, as an interdisciplinary form of art, thrives on artists with both creative and technical ability in all aspects of play making.   The difficulty for educators is to provide in-depth knowledge of a particular area, without sacrificing a student’s ability to contribute across the board. “Perhaps a PhD is more appropriate, especially as the MA now is becoming devalued academically,” suggests Lloyd Trott, but warns that he is “still thinking”.

While specialisms that differentiate dramaturgy from literary management or playwriting are useful in clarifying and increasing awareness of the role of a dramaturg, the danger of compartmentalisation that Lloyd Trott warns of is certainly a cause for concern. Outside the field of theatre, however, the distinction is clearer. The publicity for University of Glasgow's MPhil (Dramaturgy) claims to offer "a 'professional' qualification aiming to expand the traditional role of the dramaturg to include literary management and educational outreach work within the theatre, script editing and production within the broadcast media, arts journalism and theatre criticism in the printed media, and curatorial work in the context of performance and multimedia arts." The broadcast media have created a whole new area of script and writer-development job opportunities over the past decade or so. More recently, cases of restructuring at the BBC (such as the closure in the mid-nineties of the central radio drama script reading department) are examples of how much of the script assessment and development work is now being devolved to the producers. Whether established institutions such as the BBC would employ a 'dramaturg' is debatable, but there is obviously a use for dramaturgical skills in these areas. The question then, is whether the broadcast and new media share the same requirements as theatre.  

Bretton Hall is unique and pioneering in offering the only eponymous Dramaturgy BA in the UK.  However, the title of the sister strand to the straight Dramaturgy option - BA (Hons) Theatre (Dramaturgy) and Creative Writing - might suggest a more traditional conception of dramaturgy as the technical side of playwriting. What is surprising is that, after closer scrutiny of the course literature, we find that the Creative Writing is, if anything, underplayed – spreading itself rather thinly, by including screen, TV, prose, poetry writing, journalism, documentary, (auto)biography and experimental writing as well as stage writing.  Another surprise is that publicity for the Dramaturgy and Creative Writing strand lists Dramaturg and Literary Manager among its destination careers, but not Writer. The way that this course presents playwriting as a component or sub-category of dramaturgy may be seen as a reversal of the more established playwriting courses on which it is dramaturgy that represents the subsidiary part.

The longest-running and perhaps most famous of these courses for playwrights is the MPhil (an MA until 1999) in Playwriting Studies at the University of Birmingham which was set up in 1989 by David Edgar. The current Course Tutor, playwright April de Angelis, sees dramaturgy as both the technical side of playwriting (learning how to successfully structure a play, for example) and as the analytical skills needed to develop play-scripts in progress.  The former approach constitutes half of the teaching and, according to former student James Snodgrass, tends to assume dialogue-driven, “well-made plays” and to require a rather cerebral and formulaic approach.  The play-development skills, on the other hand, are – according to April de Angelis - acquired almost as a side effect of the main teaching, picked up along the way through the students’ workshops and feedback on each other’s work.  Her description of the course makes it very clear that its purpose is to train playwrights and not dramaturgs: “As I see it, dramaturgs are not imaginative, creative artists,” says de Angelis. “The dramaturg’s role is to facilitate creativity by being objective.”  Given this view, it is rather a contradiction that the course publicity mentions an option for “aspiring dramaturgs, literary managers, script assessors and editors” to develop “skills in the expanding field of dramaturgy and literary management.” 

A cynic might say that teaching dramaturgy on a playwright’s course is a way of offering literary management as a consolation prize for playwrights who do not have what it takes.  However, Anthony Dean, Head of Performance, Art and Design at the Central School of Speech and Drama, pointed out a good reason why dramaturgy should be taught in this way: “plays have dramaturgy in-built”.  Dramaturgy-for-playwrights can also be seen as a way of conceding that dramaturgy is, in fact, a creative (rather than facilitating or administrative) skill.  In the more institutionalised creative processes of Western theatre, playwrights (or their plays) are usually the initiator of a theatre event, however distant the production may be from submission.  Plays for production are predominantly selected on the basis of play-scripts.  If a play-script lacks dramaturgical rigour, it would take an exceptionally creative director to make something of it.  But what happens in creative processes that do not necessarily start with a play-script?

The MA Advanced Theatre Practice course offered by Central is a practice-based course that relies on devised, collaborative and self-determined working processes rather than the script-led model.  ‘Dramaturgy’ has been offered as a strand of Central’s MA since the course’s foundation in the early 1990s.  The course as a whole (at first a postgraduate Diploma) grew from a growing recognition of theatre as an inter-disciplinary art-form.  The course is conceived as a supportive environment that will empower students to become risk-taking, self-determining artists.  “The test,” says Anthony Dean of the desired outcomes, “is if students make the same work outside the course.”  There is a taught element (predominantly in the first two of four terms), but a major ingredient of the course comes from the experience of student companies making their own work: students from each of the strands (Lighting Design, Object Theatre and Puppetry, Scenography, Sound Design, Writing for Performance, Performance, Directing and, most recently, Creative Producing, as well as Dramaturgy) form companies that create a series of performances.  Each dramaturg on the course is assigned to two of these companies.

The Dramaturgy strand “refuses to take its cue exclusively from the literary management model, looking for inspiration instead to variations of the German model that confirm the place of the dramaturg in the rehearsal room. We needed to create something new,” says Anthony Dean.  In particular, it conceives the dramaturg as an artist “who can find ways of dealing with intertextuality between performance mediums” (Anthony Dean) and who plays “a pivotal conceptual role…participating in initial planning and research, having a guiding role in devising…” (Prospectus 2001).  This aim to involve the dramaturg at the initial stages of making work is unique amongst those surveyed here.  It is questionable, however, whether this works in practice.  A former Dramaturgy student, Athena Mandis, spoke to me of the difficulties she had on the course. “Because the other students don’t know what a dramaturg does, they – the directors mainly – were doing what was my job.”  She pinpoints the fact that the whole group were often given the brief for their next project at the same time, which meant that she could not do initial research and preparatory work.  Either the director took on this work themselves, or, more often, it simply did not take place – “which showed in the work we made.”  She felt that more direct instruction on how a dramaturg (or writer, for that matter) could engage with a devised process would have avoided this predicament.  The other students’ lack of awareness of a dramaturg’s role may have stemmed partly from the fact that Athena was the only Dramaturgy student on the course at the time. 

Most of the Central students I have spoken to voice concerns about the ‘hands-off’ teaching and the ‘free-form’ nature of practical projects on the course.  However, their success since graduating suggests that Anthony Dean’s goal of facilitating self-determining artists is being fulfilled: with ex-Central students' company Shunt’s award-winning ‘The Ballad of Bobby Francois’ is receiving good press and Athena is currently working as dramaturg on the David Glass Ensemble’s ‘The Umheimlich Spine’.

This overview of ‘dramaturgy’ courses raised some general areas of concern. It seems appropriate to look at some of these at this juncture, and to reflect a little on what might constitute successful teaching of dramaturgy. 

Many of the course convenors interviewed for this study referred to the increasing presence of practical theatre-making skills on academic qualifications.   The overall sense was that this was a positive step.  It places a recognizable value on particular theatre-making skills.  It also moves theatre study away from the literary and gives students a greater awareness of it as performance and as process.    While few disagreed with this last point, there is a feeling that academic qualifications are not the appropriate measure of practical, creative skills.   Some saw this as devaluing academic qualifications - particularly the MA - as its award no longer suggests that a student has reached a certain level of academic skill in areas such as research methodology, critical thinking and academic writing.   Others considered that it is the practical theatre-making skills that might be devalued: these are skills that must be assessed (if at all) by the quality of theatre work rather than by academic criteria.  A certain amount to cynicism accompanied these reflections, particularly in reference to current funding structures that financially 'reward' institutions for offering post-graduate degrees.

The rise of practice-based teaching is also seen as a positive sign that universities are not only keeping up with the changing face of theatre (rather than confining themselves to the literary study of the classics) but also taking their place at the forefront of theatre culture, by training pioneering artists.   Increased experience of visual and physical theatre practices demonstrates that theatre does not have to consist of naturalist narratives expressed primarily through dialogue, as it is commonly conceived in the conventional play-script.  At the same time visual/physical theatre may also highlight a need for dramaturgical skills through the example of shallow, unfocussed, structurally awkward plays that result from their absence.  At the ‘Challenging Language’ Conference in January 1999 [3] , Louise Warren, writer on many devised and site-specific projects, referred to the lack of ‘mulch time’ – a time when ideas compost and mature, when poetic rather than obvious narrative associations can be made, when the heart of the play becomes clear – as one of the most common pitfalls of devised theatre.   Universities are beginning to see it as their role to identify and redress concerns such as these.  The emphasis on links with the industry and with practitioners on many of the courses may be as much about improving the level of theatre work created in this country as about providing industry-driven marketable skills for students. 

A related point was raised by Pete Brooks, convenor of the MA Scenography at Central Saint Martins.  During a talk at the Laban Centre in January 2001 he suggested that the course might be better named "Visual Dramaturgy" because just as the term "scenography" can circumvent the confusion of distinctions between performance art, live-art, visual theatre and so on, "dramaturgy" can be used to refute the received notion of the spoken text of a play as somehow separate from the mise-en-scene that accompanies the literary play-script in performance.  Brooks takes this aspect of performance analysis into practitioner training.  Like those at Central School of Speech and Drama, Brooks sees his course as a means of empowering designers to become initiating practitioners: "In our visually oriented performance culture, the designer is a key figure.  As traditional creative hierarchies disintegrate, it is essential that designers can instigate or author projects and deal with the challenge of collaborative authorship from a position of confidence based on experience and knowledge" (course literature).

The use of the term ‘dramaturgy’ to bolster reaction against the concept of theatre as a ‘literary’ art (typified by the policy of both Central St. Martins and Central School of Speech and Drama) sits rather uncomfortably with the assumption of the more traditional playwriting courses, that dramaturgy is the domain of playwrights.  These courses may be seen as promoting not only the outmoded "well-made play", but also the inherently hierarchical creative processes that conceive the director as the writer's spokesperson, in charge of cast, and then crew.  The courses have made little concession to the increasing mainstreaming of the devised creative processes (often required to create visual and physical theatre, live and performance art) and the accompanying renegotiation of 'traditional' creative roles.   Having said that, we might remind ourselves that even one of the most pioneering courses - the MA at Central School - separates the categories of writer, designer, director, performer, designer and so on.  Perhaps there is a missed opportunity in this conception of the dramaturg as another additional category of theatre maker (and by implication not a writer, director, designer and so on).  Instead, the dramaturg might have been seen as an alternative to this, as an initiating artist who is articulate and creative across the range of theatrical systems of expression.

Both theatre practitioners and academics (often one and the same) are beginning to formulate concepts, like that above, of the 'ideal' dramaturg required to salvage our theatre culture.  The ideal dramaturg might be someone who, like their European or North American counterpart, can communicate with the audience, the programming department and creative team, straddling and uniting areas that are often perceived as distinct in Western theatre.  Or else, they might be thought of as a practitioner who, in response to a re-visioning of creative roles, can forge a new role, and refine or redefine theatre making.  Whatever the different conceptualisations, what is being asked for in a dramaturg seems to be someone who can bring together areas of theatre making and reception that have become splintered.   What seems to be required is both intimate knowledge of, and critical distance from, every aspect of theatre planning, making and production - be it creative, analytical, critical, entrepreneurial, administrative, cerebral or inspirational - and, in the case of the dramaturg-practitioner, natural talent too.  

How can university-based training answer this challenge?  Dramaturgy courses that teach students to facilitate others’ creative processes leave them directionless outside a theatre-based infrastructure.   Playwriting courses that teach dramaturgy courses at least recognise dramaturgy as a creative act, but it is not always easy for playwrights trained in this way to find their place within less traditional creative processes, let alone to see themselves as artists empowered to determine their own role.   Universities already acknowledge the fact that the most they can offer is the first step of a long journey, and that experience is what counts.

Ajaykumar, lecturer at Goldsmiths, mentioned in casual conversation that the BA on which he teaches (a very broad - some students have suggested, too broad - overview of both theory and practice) might be "good for a dramaturg." His words might hold more weight than he intended. Offering named dramaturgy specialisms (be it as a module or as a course in itself) raises the possibility of yet another job-title, yet another category of practitioner. A long education, both within an academic context and through experience in the field, across the range of historical, theoretical and practical disciplines, seems to be what is called for. If what is required is breadth and depth of knowledge and experience, the answer may, in fact, lie in resisting the sort increasingly specialised teaching outlined here. Dramaturgy in universities, as it is in the conventional play-script, should be 'in-built', permeating throughout the drama subject-lists, unnamed but providing an implicit shared understanding across the increasingly compartmentalized areas of study. In this way, students will have a greater ability not only to choose their destination career but also to forge new facilitating and creative roles, and new ways of making theatre.

[1] A conference hosted by Central School of Speech and Drama, and accompanying document published in collaboration with Total Theatre.

[2] A series of semi-formal meetings among the Literary Managers of many of London's fringe theatre venues hosted by Fringe Theatre Network.  The aims included standardizing script-reading procedures, increasing awareness of other theatres' policies in order to be able to refer on scripts and writers, and assessing legal and other implications of script-development work. 

[3] A one-day laboratory held by Writernet (then the New Playwrights’ Trust) ‘in response to a call from theatre writers to explore new processes of writing theatre.

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