Clare Bayley

Clare Bayley’s plays explore contemporary political stories through the frame of human relationships. They include Blue Sky, about the CIA’s rendition and torture programme, told through the friendship between an investigative journalist and a planespotter. It was developed at the National Theatre studio and produced by Pentabus at Hampstead Theatre, Sherman Theatre Cardiff (2012) and in Raleigh, North Carolina (2016).

The Container (2007) looks at the plight of a group of migrants attempting to reach the UK hidden inside a container lorry. It won a Fringe First Award and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award when it was produced in a container at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It transferred to the Young Vic in London. It has since been produced in containers in Cardiff, Toronto (Canada), Melbourne (Australia), Baltimore and Texas, as well as in Mexico and Germany. There are plans for productions in Rome and Malaysia.

She wrote an English version of The Enchantment by the nineteenth-century Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson, for the National Theatre, Cottesloe (2007).

She has written a number of plays for BBC Radio 4.

She is co-author with Fraser Grace of Playwriting: an artists’ and writers’ companion (Bloomsbury), and is part of the playwrights’ group, The Plot.

She is former Theatre Editor of the Independent newspaper.

For Metta Theatre she’s writing a play about the effects of screen time on our lives and our brains; and is completing a play written while on attachment to Oxford Playhouse.

She lives in London with her husband and two teenage sons.