INTERVIEW Oskar Keogh
Theatre-maker Brett Bailey returns with the most recent iteration of his adaptation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, The Stranger. It is showing at Theatre Arts in Observatory, Cape Town, on 27th and 28th February 2026. The developing writers for the theatre cohort sat down with Bailey to discuss the production and delve into his colourful past and idiosyncratic process.
Sitting around a small table in one of the Theatre Arts rehearsal rooms, four young writers and one seasoned practitioner. We are eager to find out how it all began.
Bailey doesn't attribute his start to any grandiose or celestial circumstances; his interest in theatre began with a crush. “I fell into it at university,” Bailey tells us. “I started off doing something else, and I just ended up doing it. Actually, there was a girl that I liked, and I wanted to do the same course as her”. His unabashed candour is both refreshing and disarming. As we all talk, he quickly renders certain lines of questioning entirely obsolete. “Yeah, don’t get sucked into my vortex”, he warns, as he whirls and weaves through stories from his past.
In discussing his investment in African cosmologies and his relationship with township artists, the issue of his whiteness arises. We are curious about how he navigated working from this position of privilege when creating his early works, before establishing his longstanding artistic relationships.
“It's a story,” Bailey interjects. “It's a story, and I don't think I was conscious about it. I was living on nothing. We made our first show on 10,000 Rand, but it was certainly my race that had given me access to education and to a belief that I could go wherever I wanted to go and do whatever I wanted to do. So I carry that with me. Grace.”
He speaks about working around the time of Apartheid’s dismantling, reflecting on it as a moment of national optimism and excitement. The cessation of borders and boundaries between people and cultures seemed to allow for a kind of collision of worlds in Bailey’s mind:
“The first world colliding with the third world, and the West colliding with Christianity, colliding with traditional religions, became very interesting to me at that moment” he says.
Acts of collision appear to form the central puncture point for many of his works, perhaps even acting as a throughline in his career. His personal intention for his productions seem to be to draw out the tacticity in complex webs of relation. For Bailey, it is far more crucial to feel it than to approach the work from some abstract totality of understanding. “Because otherwise, it's just intellectual. You have to experience it,” he urges.
As we spoke through some of his experiences, gathering stories and memories from people around the world, from the Transkei to Japan, the question of collaboration arose. “I like cats and occasionally people, but I'm not naturally a collaborative person”, Bailey tells us, smiling. His work is by no means an act of co-creation; it is the culmination of months and sometimes years of his redrafts. “Out of every page of text, there's like forty, fifty pages of text that I don't use”, he reveals.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering The Stranger has been reworked, again and again, over many years as an iterative performance piece. When asked about the significance of this particular Greek tragedy, his connection had much less to do with any kind of literary or historical fascination; once again, it came down to an elemental feeling. “It sits inside me”, he says. “It's like a haunting thing. It's like something that sits there and just wants to work its way out all the time”.
Bailey sits at the head of the table like a wise sage who speaks directly from the gut without artifice. He meets the trepidation in our questions with equal parts equanimity. Perhaps it was this mood, whilst knowing that Bailey’s work has had its fair share of public controversy, that prompted the discussion to land on the topic of regret and self-censorship. “I've made works that have upset a lot of people”, he tells us. “I don't regret at all. I've broken people's hearts, I don't regret. I've had my own heart broken, I don't regret”.
His approach to the work, and to his life which appears inseparable from it, seems to carry with it both a grave sense of responsibility and a total air of abandon. Echoing the old Taoist saying, “Question everything. Believe nothing. Accept everything”. In an epoch that continues to uphold dualisms, Bailey’s approach has the potential to be received by others with either a great sigh of relief or as an incredible threat to their bounded sense of personal sovereignty.
“We're just human beings”, says Bailey. “We're not some ideological framework. We are people who talk from experience, you know, and we make mistakes, and those mistakes are in our work, and they give it life and blood and smell and shit and cock on the tongue and whatever”.
The Stranger will be performed at Theatre Arts, Cape Town, on 27th and 28th February.