‘La Scala was maddening’: an interview with John Macfarlane, the finest set designer of his generation

Pantomime season is upon us, and unless your taste in colour runs no further than Smarties, there is no more magnificent spectacle on offer than Birmingham Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker – performed so many hundred times since its première in 1990 that two years ago it disintegrated and required reconstruction.

Its scenery and costumes are the work of John Macfarlane, a softly spoken Glaswegian who is ranked worldwide as one of the great stage designers of his generation. They demonstrate in abundance a quality that characterises all his work: a brooding chiaroscuro, in which nightmarishly surreal flickers of ruin and decay are shot through with gorgeous sensuality. There is no tinsel-pink prettiness. His Nutcracker has been inspired by the haunted imagination of E.T.A. Hoffmann rather than the sugar coating of Walt Disney. Those of a nervous disposition might find it positively terrifying at moments. Everyone else is enchanted.

Throughout his career Macfarlane has gone his own way, standing apart from the fashionable theatrical trends for timber frames, chrome and leather, white boxes and video projection. ‘I’m not one to be bothered by what other people are doing,’ he says with a diffident shrug. If he stands in any tradition, it is that of the old-school illusionism of the proscenium arched theatre, with its hung backcloths, receding wings and magically ‘flown’ transformations. Mystery trumps clarity in his aesthetic and shadowy ambiguities mask the certainties of daylight.