Biography

Mark Bailey has designed over 200 productions of theatre, opera and ballet in Britain, Europe and North America.

Recent designs include productions at Cardiff’s The Other Room, Birmingham Rep, Citizens Glasgow, Theatr Clwyd and the UK tour of Ghost The Musical (also Moscow). Other productions include Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear (Chicago); Pieces (Clwyd and New York); The Pretenders (National Theatre of Norway); The Threepenny Opera (National Theatre).

Ballets include The Boy In the Striped Pyjamas (Northern Ballet); Nijinsky, God of the Dance (Slovakian National Ballet); The Snow Queen, (ENB, also Lithuania, Vienna, Prague); Melody on the Move (ENB); The Sleeping Beauty (Hong Kong Ballet); A Time There Was (Copenhagen). Opera designs include Madame Butterfly (Nevill Holt Grange Park), Carmen (ROH, Linbury Studio); Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Los Angeles Opera), Iolanthe (D’Oyly Carte Opera), and Ariadne Auf Naxos (Maggio Musicale Florence/Opera de Lausanne)

A new ballet, and a problem of how to show the holocaust on stage with respect and dignity for the victims. As a team we struggled to get this right, and my design eventually took its tone from the music, composed by Gary Yershon. Gary created an extraordinary score, challenging and difficult to listen to but also strangely beautiful and haunting.

After a visit to Auschwitz I designed a bleak, hostile space, a slab of wall, not directly taken from anything I had seen at the camp, but evoking it. Into this I placed various objects, most notably the’fence’ itself, and it became a strange object of beauty, a symbol of both hope and separation.