Welcome to our online showcase featuring the exceptional work of our Performance degree students throughout the academic year 2024-25! This online space celebrates the work of performance students through photography, creative writing, and behind-the-scenes insights into their artistic journeys.
Our students engage with a rich and varied curriculum that includes devising original work, performing contemporary texts, reinterpreting classics, and engaging with the works of Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco, and Shakespeare etc. Their creativity comes to life in assessed performances where they take bold risks, refine their craft, and discover their unique artistic voices.
This site offers a window into that evolving process—into the moments of experimentation, collaboration, and transformation that shape their work.
Creative Research Project (Level 10)
Creative Research Project is a dynamic, practice-led module undertaken across two terms. This year, the BA Performance cohort engaged in an intensive process of research, creative development, and production, culminating in a large-scale group performance project and two accompanying pieces of written work. Each group responded to a bespoke commission brief created by a professional mentor from the creative industries. These mentors played an active role in the creative journey, offering guidance and feedback at key points throughout the rehearsal process and attending the final performances.
This digital showcase offers a glimpse into the outcomes of this rich and collaborative process. While only two of the performances are highlighted in detail here, the full cohort produced a diverse and ambitious range of work that reflects the depth and variety of their creative responses.
What's Been Happening? Your Vote Matters!
New Writing | Sketch Comedy | Music | Audience Participation
What’s Been Happening? Your Vote Matters! is a bold, fast-paced sketch comedy performance that blends new writing, music, video, and audience interaction to explore the absurdities of modern politics. Set as a satirical late-night show, the piece channels the energy of viral culture into sharp political commentary, asking urgent questions about civic engagement and the role of younger generations in shaping our democracy.
Created and performed by final-year BA Performance students, this vibrant and provocative show invites audiences to laugh, reflect, and reconsider their place in the democratic process.
Exploring the Trolls of Peer Gynt
Adaptation | Classic Text | Physical Theatre | Character Exploration
This inventive performance brings a fresh take to one of the most surreal scenes in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt—Peer’s encounter with the daughter of the Troll King. Using Colin Teevan’s bold modern adaptation, final-year BA Performance students explored the world of the trolls through movement, voice, and ensemble work.
The piece dives into the grotesque and the absurd, using the troll kingdom as a lens to explore ego, illusion, and otherness. With a playful yet probing approach, the students offer a striking visual and physical reimagining of this classic scene for a contemporary audience.
Creative Festival (Level 9)
Creative Festival is a vibrant Level 9 module that offers BA Performance students the opportunity to create and present original work for a public audience as part of a performance festival at Ayr Campus. With support from the teaching team, students form self-directed companies and take on a range of creative, technical, and production roles to develop and deliver professional-standard performances.Creative Festival, allows students to move beyond prescriptive forms, consolidating their own artistic practice and exploring collaborative, student-led approaches to performance-making. Delivered through a combination of in-person workshops, mentoring, and self-directed rehearsals, Creative Festival celebrates autonomy, experimentation, and ensemble-based work. This digital showcase captures highlights from this year’s performances and offers a glimpse into the creative potential that will continue to develop in future cohorts.
Creative Festival 2024
This year's festival showcased five entirely new productions full of ideas, creativity and joyful celebration of the power of performance. Collective and individual new writing projects, adaptations of known stories and carefully choreographed movement pieces cover a range of themes and styles: from the joys and pains of growing up to the sinister intrigues of small-down murders from the heights of Mount Olympus to the resurrection of a lost friend from the underworld.
Devising (level 8)
Devising is a playful and collaborative Level 8 module that invites students to explore ensemble-based performance through physicality, storytelling, and improvisation. Working closely with peers, students engage in a wide range of approaches to making performance, with an emphasis on experimentation, curiosity, and collective creativity.
Throughout the module, students explore different modes of play, physical performance, and narrative-making to generate original material. The work created might be personal, political, poetic—or all three. It may reflect individual identities, shared experiences, or speak directly to an audience. The emphasis is on discovering what you want to say and how you want to say it through performance.
Delivered through in-person workshops and practical exploration, Devising supports students in developing their creative voice within an ensemble, laying a strong foundation for future collaborative and self-led work. This digital showcase features moments from this year's cohort and gives insight into the inventive spirit that drives the module each time it runs.
Hidden Spectators
Ensemble: Jay Forsyth, Kaia Halstead, Eve Shrimpton, Jerry Wong
This piece is a journey consisting of four statues, who have lived through all the stages of Craigie House. They express emotions, feelings and thoughts – both positive and negative – that take the audience on a journey of trying to understand these “living” statues.They have had many years of listening and seeing the surroundings change and progress. However, those who have stepped into and beyond the house and its ground do not know they have been listened to and watched. At all times.We want the audience to understand they may never know who is watching them, or when.
Anyone Want a Cup of Tea?
Ensemble: Lois Carlyle, Elicia Harkins, Amber McCaffer
Anyone Want a Cup of Tea? follows three young women making a cup of tea. Taking place in the kitchen of Craigie House, this piece looks into the factual history of tea and the personal history of tea and what it means to each of us.This piece looks at the history of how tea became popular in Britain as well as taking a nostalgic look back at tea from the perspective of our ensemble.This performance explores how the beloved hot drink has brought people together for generations, whether it’s on a tea break at work, visiting relatives or catching up with an old friend, nothing seems to bring people together like a nice cup of tea.
Memories of the Past
Ensemble: Susan Dodd, Stephanie Donnelly, Millie Lawson, Seonidh MacFarlane
Our short performance begins with an ode to Robert Burns, Ayr’s much revered writer of poetry and songs. This performance is also a reflection on the timelessness of girlhood, how no matter what stage in life you are, nor what era of time you are in, girlhood is carried on throughout in a way of supporting and uplifting one another. As we begin, we show the fun and exciting times within girlhood, which then leads into a mature and caring relationship between women.
A Very Important Meeting
Ensemble: Logan Aikman, Charlotte Fisk, Finley Sneddon, Darrien Watson
Date: 1/4/2025
Time: 1pm
Location: Craige House
Topic: Today’s agenda will be discussed in detail in the conference room on the uppermost level of Craigie House – that’s the one above the ground floor – where we will discuss the current state of the numerical diplomacies, regarding the nuanced affairs situated within, atop and beneath the Cragie estate. It’s imperative that all in attendance listen well, with their ears, as they focus on the statistics shown and the quotas needing met.
The “council” will also be permitted a break, allocated by the administration of approximately 3 minutes; situated adjacent to the three large, foreboding windows. The meeting will adjourn precisely where it began, upon the landing above the entryway of the foyer. Thank you for your time - this meeting is sure to happen.
Practice Text Based (Level 7)
This dynamic first-year module introduces students to the core principles of text-based performance, rooted in both historical and contemporary theatre practice. In Term 1, students explore Naturalism and the influence of Stanislavski—distinguishing his work from 'Method' acting—and engage with key texts and staging techniques. In Term 2, the focus shifts to Shakespeare, where students learn to connect classical material to their own lived experiences while developing skills in classical acting and examining how Shakespeare is reimagined in today's UK theatre landscape. Across both terms, students are assessed through three practical performance projects: a Stanislavskian scene study, a Shakespearean monologue, and a contemporary reworking of a Shakespeare scene.
The Tempest
Opening scene, The Tempest, Level 7, chorus
The Tempest extract
Caliban: Harley Campbell
Trinculo: Cara McQuiston
Stefano: Brooke Ferguson
Caliban: Ben Anderson
As part of their exploration of classical theatre, first-year students rehearsed and performed a condensed version of The Tempest, applying key actor training methodologies to reinterpret Shakespeare’s text for a contemporary audience. This performance challenged students to connect voice, movement, and character with clarity and purpose, while demonstrating an informed understanding of the play’s broader performance context. Through this work, they explored how classical material can be revitalized with modern sensibilities, responding to current theatrical practices and techniques.
Extracuricular work
Love’s Labour’s Lost
BA Performance students have been working outside of their course with UWS Senior Lecturers Henry Bell (Director) and Catriona Fallow (Producer) as well as third year student Jo Hampson (Associate Director) to stage the iconic 'poem scene' from Shakespeare’s Love's Labour's Lost, in-the-round.
The story of the scene......
Set in a 1990's law firm, CEO King Ferdinand (Grant Leech) has made his colleagues Berowne (Melissa Johnstone), Longaville (Nick Pavlantis) and Dumain (Jennifer Douglass) swear an oath to avoid contact with all women for three years so they can concentrate on their legal studies. His plans are thrown into doubt when four women arrive from France asking for representation by the firm shortly afterwards. All four men secretly pen love poetry to these recent arrivals and the scene presented shows the quartet going to absurd lengths to hide their romantic attempts from each other. An unexpected arrival in the form of Costard (Lennon Hegarty) throws all assumptions into doubt. Will the legal whizzes maintain their oaths? Or will the power of love triumph after all?'