Chester Miggels | 7 March 2026
South African theatre-maker Brett Bailey has spent more than three decades building a body of work that sits somewhere between theatre, ritual, and installation art. His productions rarely follow conventional dramatic form; instead they draw from myth, spirituality, and lived experience to create immersive, often unsettling worlds on stage.
Now Bailey returns to Theatre Arts in Observatory with The Stranger, his latest reworking of the ancient myth of Orpheus. Though the story dates back thousands of years, Bailey’s version is deeply rooted in contemporary questions about artists, community, grief, and the fragile power of music.
But if his work feels deliberate and carefully constructed, his entry into theatre was anything but. “I fell into it at university,” Bailey says with a grin.
“There was a girl that I liked, and I wanted to do the same course as her.”
The anecdote immediately dismantles any sense of mythmaking around his own career. Bailey speaks plainly, sometimes provocatively, and rarely romanticises his artistic journey. What emerges instead is a portrait of an artist guided more by curiosity and instinct than by rigid artistic doctrine.
At the centre of Bailey’s latest production is the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a tale that has haunted artists for centuries. Bailey first began working with the myth nearly twenty years ago, and The Stranger marks yet another return to the story. For Bailey, the myth isn’t simply material to adapt. It feels more like an obsession.
“It’s like a haunting thing that keeps trying to work its way out,” he says.
In his interpretation, Orpheus, played by Nkosinathi Koela, arrives in a small community carrying a gift for music that transforms the atmosphere around him. His songs bring people together and awaken something vibrant within the community.
But tragedy soon follows. On the night of his wedding, his bride is killed by a snakebite. Devastated, Orpheus descends into the world of the dead in an attempt to retrieve her. When he eventually returns, the community that once celebrated him turns against him. The shift exposes something deeply human: the uneasy relationship between artists and the societies that both celebrate and abandon them.
“It’s about how an artist tries to shape the desperate threads of chaos around him into something,” Bailey says. “You hold it together for a moment and then it breaks down again.”
If Bailey’s work often feels ceremonial, that’s because ritual sits at its core. In the mid-1990s, shortly after the end of apartheid, Bailey spent time living in the Eastern Cape among Xhosa traditional healers, studying ceremonial practices and spiritual cosmologies. He immersed himself in their world, researching their rituals and beliefs while working with archives and dissertations at what is now Walter Sisulu University.
The experience profoundly shaped his understanding of performance.
“My work is definitely an extension of my spirituality,” he says.
That curiosity about spiritual traditions runs deep. Bailey traces it back to his childhood and to his grandmother, who worked as a spiritual medium. From there his interest expanded to include various ceremonial traditions, from Southern African healing practices to forms of West African voodoo.
For Bailey, myth and spirituality remain powerful tools for understanding the world, particularly in a modern society that prioritises rationality.
“Myths disturb the modern world,” he says. “They remind us that there are other ways of seeing.”
Bailey began making theatre during one of the most turbulent periods in South Africa’s history. The early 1990s marked the end of apartheid and the beginning of a new democratic era. A time when social, cultural, and political boundaries were rapidly shifting.
For Bailey, those collisions between worlds became a powerful source of inspiration.
“The first world colliding with the third world, and the West colliding with Christianity and traditional religions. That became very interesting to me,” he recalls.
These intersections still shape his work. His productions often stage encounters between different cosmologies: Western logic on one side, and spiritual traditions that recognise ancestors, dreams, and unseen worlds on the other. In that sense, Bailey sees the artist’s role not as providing answers, but as unsettling comfortable assumptions.
“The artist’s job is to create a disturbance,” he says. “To upset people, to create new ground.”
While the contemporary creative industry often demands constant output and quick production cycles, Bailey’s process moves at a very different pace. A single production can take years to develop. Scripts are written and rewritten repeatedly, with most of the material eventually discarded.
“There might be forty or fifty pages that don’t make it,” he explains.
The final stage composition is meticulously shaped, from sound and lighting to costumes, colour palettes, and choreography. Every element must work together before it appears on stage.
“I trust my choices,” Bailey says. “I don’t feel like I need to justify them.”
Bailey also speaks candidly about the complexities of his position as a white South African artist working within African cultural contexts. His early career involved collaborations with township performers and communities at a time when South Africa was still grappling with the legacies of apartheid.
Rather than avoiding the topic, Bailey acknowledges the structural advantages that shaped his opportunities.
“My race gave me access to education and the belief that I could go wherever I wanted to go,” he says.
Recognising that privilege, he suggests, is part of the ongoing responsibility of making art in a country still marked by inequality.
Over the years Bailey’s work has generated both acclaim and controversy internationally. Some productions have provoked intense criticism, particularly for their engagement with colonial history and representation. Yet Bailey remains unapologetic about the emotional risks his theatre can provoke. For him, art should challenge audiences rather than comfort them.
“I’ve made works that have upset a lot of people,” he says. “I don’t regret it.”
As he approaches sixty, Bailey says he finds himself thinking more frequently about mortality, spirituality, and the unseen dimensions of existence. These themes increasingly appear in his work. Yet despite decades of experience, the creative impulse that drives him remains restless.
And the myth of Orpheus, the musician who dares to enter the underworld, continues to linger.
“It’s not all myths,” Bailey says. “It’s this one.”
“This one I’ll probably do again.”