Drama Studies

Drama - kind of cool, and very popular. With up to eight applicants for every university place, it's a fearsomely difficult course to get on to, but don't go thinking that it's some kind of highbrow Fame Academy.

For while theatre and cinema are extraordinary cultural phenomena, it isn't all about performance. If that's your bag, you'll probably be better heading for the drama or dance schools to learn acting or dancing and nothing more. If you make that choice, bear in mind that not all the courses at drama school have degree status, so they don't all appear in the tables in this book.

Many HE institutions do, however, carry acting modules as part of a broad range - mixing theoretical and practical, studying areas such as film, theatre and radio, performance techniques, basic technical knowledge and an academic understanding of historical and critical theory. You'll work with a wide cultural perspective and with a large dollop of critical theory. At the end of it all, you can delve into theatre design, production, writing or management. Employment prospects are decent, but there's a lot of competition as you bid for work in the theatre, TV or radio or in arts management.

If performance is what you want, some drama schools have given their courses degree status, or you can do a joint honours degree, mixing acting with a more academic course. The big advantage of that is with a degree qualification you will only have to pay standard university fees. Drama schools can effectively charge privately and it can cost upwards of £10,000 a year, and you may not have the benefit of a student bank account as you won't be technically eligible. However, many drama schools have awards and scholarships you can compete f'or, which may help you financially.

Once on a degree course, students work at least five days a week, between Warn to 6pm each weekday, and during the times when they're putting on a performance (a play, not a tantrum) this can stretch from early morning to beyond midnight. Courses are rigorous and often very practical - although there has to be an element of written work for courses to qualify for degree status. And drama people tend to be idiosyncratic - it's why they want to he in the field in the first place. Sometimes they will delight you, but at the end of a long, hard week, you may need a great deal of presence of mind not to strangle someone.

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