Alex Eales

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Alex Eales is a British stage and costume designer .

life and work

Alex Eales studied at the Wimbledon School of Art .

In 2002 he designed the costumes for the world premiere of Rona Munro's psychological drama Iron at the Traverse Theater in Edinburgh. After the world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this production was also shown at the Royal Court Theater in London and at the Schauspiel Leipzig . Since then, Eales has mainly worked as a set designer in England, Scotland and Wales. He furnishes speech pieces as well as operas and musicals, for example Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet , Ibsen's Ghosts , Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and his The Caucasian Chalk Circle as well as a number of contemporary authors . In the musical sector he designed sets for My Fair Lady , West Side Story and The Wizard of Oz, among others . He has worked and works at the Pleasance in Edinburgh, the National Theater Wales, the Liverpool Playhouse Studio, the Lyceum Theater in Sheffield, the Wartford Palace Theater in Hertfordshire, the Drum Theater in Plymouth, the Warwick Arts Center in Coventry, the Royal & Derngate in Northampton, the Birmingham Repertoire Theater and the Cambridge Arts Theater and a number of London theaters - including the Arcola, KAOS, Theater 503, the Royal Court Theater - and London's Werst End . As is customary in Great Britain, many of the productions he has equipped have been shown on national tours across the country.

We have worked with British director Katie Mitchell for many years , both in opera and spoken theater. Mitchell has developed a very personal and characteristic style, mostly with simultaneous stages and video projections, in the speaking piece always with theater microphones, which enable a concert pitch and very cinematic work. Joint projects led the director and the set designer at stages in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg, to the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence , to the English National Opera and the studio stage of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden . The director and set designer achieved particularly impressive images in her production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg:

“With the ingenious idea of ​​replacing the element of doom in the canonized scenery of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, the director Katie Mitchell and her set designer Alex Eales succeeded in creating a spectacular theatrical coup. Julia Wieninger's head, floating on the immobile surface of the water as if on a tray, and her wide-open eyes, shaded by silent panic, will be remembered for a long time. A picture like an epoch signature. "

- Oswald Demattia : Floating heads and singing cakes , Der Standard (Vienna), March 3, 2015

In 2015 he was invited by interim director Sven-Eric Bechtolf to design the set for the Salzburg Festival's new production of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro . The costume designer was Mark Bouman and the lighting designer Friedrich Rom . The Vienna Philharmonic played under the direction of Dan Ettinger . This production will resume in 2016.

Stage sets (selection)

Collaboration with Katie Mitchell in spoken theater

Opera and musical productions

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Armgard Seegers: "Happy Days": The water is up to our necks , Hamburger Abendblatt , February 14, 2015
  2. ↑ Peter Kümmel: Still there! Hadn't they perished long ago? Beckett's "Happy Days" and Osborne's "Entertainer" will be retold in Hamburg - by Katie Mitchell and Christoph Marthaler. , Die Zeit (Hamburg), February 19, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Eales, Alex
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British stage and costume designer
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century