For 50 years, East 15 has produced actors, directors, theatre practitioners and technicians for the international stage, TV, film and radio. We were founded by Margaret Bury, growing from the work of Joan Littlewood’s famed Theatre Workshop which broke new ground, re-interpreting the classics for a modern age, commissioning new plays from socially committed writers, and creating an ensemble capable of inventing new work. This evolved into an outstanding ensemble that combined inspired, improvisational brilliance with method, technique, research, text analysis and the intense expression of truthful emotion. Much of our original approach was based upon the theories of Stanislavsky and, over the years, our new training methods have embraced approaches from diverse practitioners, such as Michael Chekhov, Rudolf Laban, Jerzy Grotowski, Jacques Lecoq, Peter Brook and other important contemporary trainers.
In 2000, we became a department of the University of Essex, opening an exciting new chapter and offering more opportunities to our students. Since then, more than £13 million has been spent on new buildings and facilities for our students at Loughton (on the edge of east London) and Southend-on-Sea, including the Clifftown Studios, once a Victorian gothic church which now enjoys a new lease of life following conversion into studios, workshops and a state-of-the-art theatre and performance space. We have also developed new programmes that take our students into the new era of internationally and culturally diverse theatre, film and physical theatre performance territories.
We are a member of the leading group of UK conservatoires, the Conference of Drama Schools, which grants our students automatic entry to Equity, the actor’s union. We are accredited by National Council for Drama Training and are now one of the largest specialist theatre schools in the UK, with distinguished international teaching staff.
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