Jon Bausor - Theatre Designer

The Knot Garden (Klangbogen Festival)

A soldier sells his soul to the devil. A Faustian pact retold in the light of war in Iraq.

"this is a bold and brave enterprise.... to unite British and Iraqi actors, writers and musicians in a retelling of the Stravinsky-Ramuz 1918 avant-garde musical fable. Steggall's production, played on an elliptically shattered Jon Bausor set, boasts strong images, such as a phantom violin suspended in mid-air."

Michael Billington, Guardian

Direction Andrew Steggall

Lighting Paule Constable, Jon Clark

Mary Shelley's classic gothic tale given a modern resonance.

"Bausor's towering gothic design is full of twisting staircases and chandeliers (suggestive of spirals of DNA).... a persuasive composite of high-tech staging and old-fashioned melodrama, so carefully fused you can barely see the bolt through its neck."

Alfred Hickling, Guardian

Adaptation Stephen Edwards

Direction Uzma Hameed

Lighting Lucy Carter

This production - originally developed at RADA - dramatised five of Raymond Carver's finest stories: What's in Alaska?, Fat, Cathedral, Put Yourself in My Shoes and Intimacy.

"Carver, famed for his stylistic minimalism, finds his ideal interpreter in a veteran director, undertaking his first professional production in 10 years, who has an equal dislike of false ornamentation."

Michael Billington, Guardian

Direction William Gaskill

Lighting Neil Fraser

Beijing 2005. Faced with new possibilities, two couples are caught in the midst of China's cultural change torn between its history and its contemporary reality.

In the Bag was the first full UK production of a contemporary Chinese play.

An interlocking jigsaw, relective like an enamelled Japanese box exposed and copied by the light of a scanner.

Direction Lorne Campbell

Lighting Philip Gladwell

(Part of a double bill with Winners by Brien Friel)

A young girl has drowned. Her body is carried home. The village is in mourning. Her family have yet to be told. This symbolist piece is filled with hesitant figures, glimpses through windows, like the silence of a painting.

Direction Christopher Heimann

Lighting Philip Gladwell

In a remote cabin, trapped by choice, a couple ride a roller-coaster track towards a new destination every night. The play embraced the live, unrepeatable nature of performance; constantly evolving every evening, each audience sees two new versions of SwitchBack.

"haunting design"

Joyce MacMillan, Scotsman

Writing and direction Adrian Osmond

Lighting Kai Fischer

(Part of a double bill with The New Tenant)

A wealthy businessman races to discover oil. As he approaches his goal, he starts to doubt his porters. Are they cutthroats and thieves? Or are they the exception that proves the rule?

"Bosch's vibrant, cartoonish production brings colour to Brecht's black-and-white vision of capitalism"

Guardian

Direction Jan-Willem van den Bosch

Lighting Philip Gladwell

A man moves to a new flat. The removal men are astonished by the vast quantity of furniture to deliver. Ridiculous and horrific, Eugène Ionesco's short play makes defining personal space into an art form. The set became a folding removal box crammed with 50s G-plan furniture.

Direction Alex Murdoch

Lighting Philip Gladwell

A Chinese medieval play told using voice and hand and body movements, giving a lyrical dance-like feel that tried to echo the system of stylized gestures from fourth century zaju theatre.

"The beautiful set (was) a backdrop of burnished green with a stream of gold running through it and reams of bamboo sticks hanging from the roof on either side."

Times

Translation Liu Jung-En

Direction Tom Wright

Lighting Philip Gladwell

Professor Bernhardi, Arcola Theatre, March 2004

Two curtains open to expose violent prejudices lurking beneath the surface of a Viennese hospital, scenes changed and revealed behind like an x-ray.

Adaptation Samuel Adamson

Direction Mark Rosenblatt

Lighting Tim Mascall

A deeply traditional community ruled by God and superstition. A cross of pallets dissecting the space, held together by four patches of land, lines of boundary. Interior happens on exterior all muddied and dirty.

adaptation Dennis Kelly

Direction Gari Jones

Lighting Tim Mascall

Munich, 1906. Klara lives with her singing teacher and his wife. But when a backstreet abortionist is arrested, a secret emerges which threatens to destroy the household's respectability. Wire piano strings disect the stage into two; a prison, both real and in the mind.

Adaptation Neil Fleming

Direction Deborah Bruce

Lighting Neil Sloan

Shards of an exploded boudoir mirror stick into a snowy landscape- catwalk meets high religious images of death.

"Snow White in Black.....takes the concept of unnatural mothers and lost children to delicious gothic extremes, casting the wicked Queen as Joan Crawford (specifically, Mommie Dearest) and having the waiflike Snow White swaying on stilts over a brood of spooky changeling dwarves. This is a work of comic, perverse originality fabulously staged and expertly performed."

Judith Mackrell, Guardian

Choreography Arthur Pita

Lighting Lucy Carter

A dynamic, abstract dance response to Thomas Ades' score Asyla choreographed by Cathy Marston. 5 strands of electricity giving life force to 5 dancers, interacted with like radio waves. Filmed for BBC4.

Choreography Cathy Marston

Lighting Simon Bennison

"In a stunning, in-your-face co-production...set by Tippett in a metaphorical labyrinth, Bausor achieves a true coup de theatre the yards-long false white ceiling becomes transparent; duplicates of all the furniture from the living room are frozen as if captured in mid-fall several storeys above the audience in the depot's atrium....This is as good as opera gets."

Larry L. Lash, Financial Times

Musical direction Walter Kobera

Direction Wally Sutcliffe

Lighting Norbert Chmel

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