New courses

This playful and creative mask course, suitable for students at any level, introduces you to the mask. You will be carefully guided to explore the principals and techniques required to bring a character to life, to create speech with the body and without the voice. Masks will be provided but why not bring along some different style outfits and a variety of hats with you, then you’ll have more to play with on the day.

This course explores the Medieval Mystery plays, also known as the York Corpus Christi plays, focusing on the oldest of the four great cycles of biblical drama that have survived from late Medieval England. We will consider theatrical conventions, costumes and props, the performances and open-air staging of the plays and the medieval guilds and writers that were responsible for them.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

It is generally accepted that medieval illuminated manuscripts are very beautiful things. Something to do with all that gold-leaf maybe. While we cannot hold them in class, close-up digital reproduction will allow us to see if they really are as beautiful as we are told. Indeed, are none of them ugly? Join this course to find out.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Explore the intimate relationship between Beckett’s universe of unbelief, presided over by a Godot who never comes, and Dante’s poem, the most exalted, vastly influential literary expression of medieval Christianity, whose presence can be felt everywhere in the Irishman’s long oeuvre, in every genre – in his plays, novels, stories, poems, essays - and at every stage of his career. What brought them together, and what were the results?