Stewart is a Scottish theatre director, currently Associate Director with the National Theatre of Scotland, and is planning his first large scale production with the company, due to premiere in 2019.

Stewart has directed for the Royal Court Theatre, National Theatre of Scotland, Citizens Theatre, Lyceum Theatre, Dundee Rep, Traverse Theatre, Garsington Opera, Scottish Opera, Grange Park Opera, Norrlandsoperan, Malmö Opera and the Bavarian State Opera’s Opera Studio.

He originally trained as a theatre designer at Central School of Art and Design in London. He has worked extensively as a theatre designer throughout the UK and internationally. He has designed for the West End and Broadway, winning a Tony Award for his work on the musical Titanic. His most recent designs include the epic production of The Hairy Ape at The Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Stewart is also Artistic Director of Untitled Projects, which he formed in 1998. Recent Untitled Projects include:

The End of Eddy (2018): The first English language stage adaptation of Edouard Louis’ best-selling French novel. Born into poverty in an isolated village in rural France, a boy grows up amongst hard men and women living hard and violent lives. Bullied relentlessly for being gay, this is the story of Eddy’s struggle to understand who he is, who he might become, and of his fight to escape.Written when he was just 21 and combining vivid storytelling with frank reflections on sexuality, class and power, this new stage adaptation of Édouard Louis’s internationally acclaimed autobiographical novel is filled with hope, lust, love and anger.

Directed by Stewart Laing and adapted by Pamela Carter, the show was made with the Unicorn Theatre for young people and was specifically aimed at an age 16+ audience group.

The End of Eddy opened at Edinburgh International Festival 2018, toured small rural venues in Scotland, played a London run at the Unicorn, and completed its original iteration at Dublin Theatre Festival 2018. In 2019 it was presented at Melbourne International Arts Festival and The Next Wave Festival at Brooklyn Academy of Arts.

Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (2013): a pioneering new performance that distils and extrapolates James Hogg’s classic Scottish novel of religious obsession. A co-production with National Theatre of Scotland, Tramway and Summerhall, the production was part of the Dublin Theatre Festival 2014, Ystad Theatre Festival 2014 and the Edinburgh International Festival 2015.

The Salon Project (2011 + 2013): a piece of immersive theatre, dressing the audience in full nineteenth century costume for a provocative evening of music, talks, video and conversation.

The Salon Project was originally presented in a co-production with the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. A 2^nd edition of The Salon Project was presented in 2013 at the Citizens Theatre and at the Barbican in London as part of SPILL Festival of Performance.

Other productions for Untitled Projects include: J G Ballard Trilogy (2000); blind_sight (2004); Slope (2006); An Argument About Sex (2008); and Slope Redux (2014).