“John Macfarlane Theatre Design and Studio”
Simon Jenner reviews this Graffeg publication
18 November 2024
I
Open this book and it is not words that strike you first. After you’ve been assaulted by vivid paintings, sketches, stage back-drops and cover-drops, you wonder at the power of so many blasted skies. You would instantly notice the predominant red/black tones with forays into yellow; though usually it looks like hellfire. More specifically Scottish hellfire in an extraordinary backcloth blaze for Macbeth. The book is published by Cardiff-based Graffeg, Cardiff being where Macfarlane now lives.
Its 256 pages with endpapers are produced in large square format. Full-page reproductions of paintings and designs follow a ribbon of introductory text, which after those essays proceeds with 17 of Macfarlane’s major commissions for opera and ballet since the early 1990s; followed by unrelated studio paintings. Arranged alphabetically by title, not composer or a more revealing chronology, these productions show that Macfarlane’s vision and basic technique remain the same. Equally it shows every commission draws a radical reinterpretation of both opera or ballet, and that Macfarlane rethinks his basic imagery each time. Though some core motifs recur.
That is to be expected when charting over 30 years of one man’s theatre design. The designs render those productions, as Macfarlane’s colleagues state, unforgettable. Nightmarishly so. A huge mouth adorns the front-cloth of Humperdinck’s cosy 1893 opera Hansel and Gretel. Lips pout menacing out of Handel’s Agrippina. A whirr of clocks and cog-wheels nightmare their way through Prokofiev’s Cinderella. A huge Rat King (no Mouse King here) jumps out at The Nutcracker. Verdi’s Macbeth seems almost duvet-clad with lowering skies: and skeletons, particularly skulls, confide in you out of nearly everywhere. Stage drop-cloths change throughout a single performance. In Agrippina, Rome’s suckling Wolf progressively agonises and dissolves in stripes of blood and flesh.
II
McFarlane (born 1948) graduated in 1970 from the Glasgow School of Art. But then so did his father as an architect and superb watercolourist who died when Macfarlane was young. His mother too graduated in textiles. It’s a striking dual inheritance. Macfarlane manifested both an obsession from childhood with scale models and architecture; and a similar one with materials, down to costume details. McFarlane though pursues material, cloth, plastics and glass as media in themselves; the viscous stuff through which light is refracted.
It’s this need to interact with every material, even refract his art through each of its glaucous windows, that defines Macfarlane’s approach. Few designers, perhaps no-one, his admirers state here, can match Macfarlane’s professional knowledge of theatre fabric and theatrical craft. This need too to riffle through every production with his fingers, to manifest every drop and facet, means he works alone. Certain tasks can be delegated. It’s not that he’s not the most affable of companions either. But scene-painting, the look of the whole is Macfarlane’s: even the blocking-in.
After five years at the Young Vic under the legendary Frank Dunlop, Macfarlane gravitated to opera and ballet and has remained there exclusively.
Now we are both Glaswegians… [there is] a savage bleakness that I personally recognise as coming from a specifically Scottish perspective. Our history as a country is steeped in bloodshed, in turmoil and an iron-boned will to survive … That essential dark tension … is imbued with a tragic inflection that is so often missing from conventional designs …
That’s opera and ballet director David McVicar in one of three contributing introductory essays. It certainly gives a local habitation to the artwork. A fourth is by Macfarlane himself.
Anthony Freud, General Director of Chicago Opera, picks up what several comment on: that Macfarlane, a talented musician, thinks through music not play-plot, as Macfarlane admits; and has a consummate technical sense of how theatrical design might work. Most particularly, Freud cites Macfarlane’s sense of architecture and scale, as against his own studio still-lives: where intriguingly all those suppressed colours emerge, like cabbage greens, light blue-greys, yolk yellows.
Skies and light define where the images live, and skies are what every collaborator returns to. Macfarlane’s regular lighting designer David Finn, so responsible for sculpting and scooping out gulphs of dark and light against Macfarlane’s varying cloths, brings in Constable, Gainsborough, above all Turner: “At times the sky becomes the driving force of the image … The power of John’s skies, in turn, allows for endless modulation…” But here too is Macfarlane’s material sense:
For a lighting designer, Macfarlane’s skies are a dream. There are unlimited opportunities to manipulate the paintings. Light only the corner and leave the rest black, and hints of front light to create depth, or alter the colouring. He often layers paint on both sides of a drop. He adds softly painted scrim or glass clears (transparent glass-like drops) in front of the skies that offer wisps of stratus-shaped clouds, or mirror ramps at the base of the drop to obscure the connection to the ground, or he produces double-height drops to roll for minutes on end to reveal a burning or blackened sky.
III
If Macfarlane’s studio paintings and still-lifes echo, say, the muted palette of Manet and Courbet, it’s because one might almost call him the fifth of the four great Scottish Colourists of the early-mid twentieth century. These took their bearings from Manet, Courbet and Cézanne but are gloriously distinctive: Francis Cadell, Leslie Hunter, Samuel Peploe and its leader J.D. Fergusson. Macfarlane is not as clean and brightly-contrasted as Cadell, or Fergusson in his thicker impasto’d manner: but allowing for a few generations, there’s a layering and sweep closer to Peploe’s island landscapes and Fergusson’s thinner sketchier language.
It’s the difference to everyone else though that distinguishes Macfarlane. Still-lifes aside, he covers vast areas with what looks like thinning oils (and mixed media) to the near-consistency of his father’s other medium: watercolours. To anyone who has painted, the amount of linseed and thinning agents induces an awe-inspiring moment trying to imagine how Macfarlane sweeps with large brushes, even rollers: yet manages to twirl round and catch a thicker impasto’d knot, or a sudden scumbling. Sometimes there is an almost cartoonish finish with frayed black dry brushwork. Occasionally there is a scumble over a dried surface.
You imagine that like the Venetian post-Renaissance painter Tintoretto he might cover a church wall with a mural in a single night, and wonder if an imaginary competition between them might be set up with a little time-travel. In sheer fantasy, if much darker, Macfarlane too seems like a baroque master manqué: he covers huge arial spaces like another later Venetian, Tiepolo. The latter though floats in light cobalt optimism: heaven is for Deists. With Macfarlane hell hovers above; its pitch awaits you.
But that image alone won’t convey the knots and knurls of detail. Nor the pressure on different media of Macfarlane’s imagination. Hence the dryer use of pencil and crayon on black-blocked sketches and the oily blur of oil pastel oranges and pinks as flames are scratched over with skulls; and a malice of hovering faces.
Macfarlane’s paintings reside in many galleries and private collections. Though it’s stated they bear no direct relation to his theatre work, it’s clear they channel a different pressure of Macfarlane’s imaginings; and feed back with interest. Even the small green cabbage, one feels, somehow creeps back with its thick squidgy stripes of green: a little like striped toothpaste in a series of sage and mint pastels.
IV
The productions though are the thing. The 17 covered here might have been presented chronologically, but it’s easiest to follow as laid out. Some, like the first, Handel’s early 1709 opera Agrippina (several opera houses from 2,000-20,20, all directed by McVicar), have in any case spanned those years; their worlds have been recalibrated but not transformed. The tale of Nero’s conniving mother expressed in a sensual mouth and nose, a young woman triumphing in vulpine sexual consumption and a blood-gleamed lip, establishes the palette of reds and whites. The black here is restrained.
By contrast the black-and-grey images from Rossini’s 1816 opera The Barber of Seville (Sante Fe Opera, 1996) are more focused on costumes. Quite soon though we are swooping into Macfarlane’s recessive, shadowed use of a clockface: the whole of Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella (Birmingham Royal Ballet 2010) condensed into that midnight clop-tocking and brass admonition of time, that expresses the most memorable part of the 1944 score. And that is just the start. There is drop after drop of spiky carriage and period clocks; as well as (almost incidentally) a beleaguered heroine.
The Royal Opera House 2002 production of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók’s nightmarish 1911 opera features a favourite Macfarlane tropes: recesses, doors, walls. The notional prison is an obsession Macfarlane underscores whenever he can, and here it’s in-built. Aisles of stone recede in seven tenebrous doors flecked with blood at the root; hinted horror.
In Strauss’s 1909 opera Elektra (McVicar, Chicago, 2012) the liqueous palate is to the fore – again Macfarlane’s painterly way with black ground and backdrop flickers over a woman in shimmering dress: dark locks and a silvery dove-grey set of contrasts. Elektra herself is inordinate and alone.
Liebermann’s ballet Frankenstein (choreographed by Liam Scarlett, Royal Ballet, 2016) marks a ballet with a disturbed front cloth. It uses the clever x-ray conceit of an early nineteenth-century spirit of scientific enquiry to reproduce half a skull (with a grave-snatching surgeon’s measurements calibrated across, and the other half muscled in a blood-red sheen.) In a charcoal-dug laboratory conscience and humanity are dwarfed.
The next page shows a rare illustration from a production. Frankenstein’s back is turned and he gestures to a blue-illumined gantry fretted with electric bolts way above. Suffused with bright sulphur strips of equipment and a hint of a Colosseum space beyond, it’s as if this experimenter sucks in the consequence – even history – of humanity into his distorting world. Nature in a few far trees is locked out.
Humperdinck’s 1893 Hansel and Gretel transfixes with a front cloth of a mouth. In a gloop of bared teeth and gums it ravens like the apotheosis of Agrippina. Originally at Welsh National Opera in 1997, still directed by Richard Jones it was revived at the Met, New York in 2008.
Verdi’s 1847 (revised 1865) Macbeth (Chicago, 2010) again directed by McVicar features a blasted deserted church as much as heath, and one of those skies burns out angrily in a sunset oppressed with Turneresque storm clouds. McVicar and Macfarlane’s Scottish vision is fevered through with charcoal smashed across jagged and burned houses; and a sudden smooth swathe of one painting where from Act IV ‘The Refugees’ are named and featured, fleeing the oppressor. Witches though with a cloud of skulls, a crayon-scratched world of heads give place to a march-past of helmeted skulls. They are more painterly, the helmets sixteenth-century, gleaming out of the Armada.
Often Macfarlane washes an impression of heads with sepia, akin to Renaissance cartoons. You can watch him turn a ball of body-colour into the question mark of the back of a head, flicker features, leave a bewilderment of humanity. Finn’s discussion of lighting reaches an apotheosis in Macbeth: he lights nearly all 17 of Macfarlane’s productions here.
Except Paule Constable’s lighting contribution in productions like (one of three Mozarts) The Magic Flute (Royal Opera House, 2003) and Tchaikovsky’s final 1890 ballet The Nutcracker (Birmingham Royal Ballet 1990, 2022). Both require more colour and fantasy. It’s a relief to turn to these, where the Queen of the Night appears with a tiger’s head, flourishing orange and almost healthy fur. Think Fuseli’s “The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters”. The moon’s crescent in sheer white pulses through several scenes with ultramarine backdrops as if just for once, light will triumph. In resolutely eighteenth-century Enlightenment dress, dun and grey do battle with the grisaille shimmer of the Queen herself.
Sir Peter Wright’s choreography in The Nutcracker might feature that Rat but the backdrop here is almost Hockney-ish in its much tighter handling of imagery. Ultramarine blue is almost shocking. A winking sun in cadmium yellow and bright 3D lemon is stuck on as if a passing lepidopterist mistook the sun for a butterfly. There is a light scarlet too, though ruby-deep, not blood-red; and shocking emerald green as a Christmas tree spins on its axis in the middle, spiking the blue.
V
Nevertheless, Tchaikowsky’s opera Queen of Spades returns us (Jones, Welsh National Opera, 2001) to a woman’s face: save that here there are three ages as the Countess realized in smudges and not the crystalline lips of Agrippina, progressively ages and ends skull-like in three drops. Again, directed by McVicar at Scottish Opera in 2012, Stravinsky’s 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress exhilarates in full Macfarlane skull mode. Indeed, casually slouching skeletons and the climactic cemetery scene dominate even more than the final madhouse.
With McVicar again, now at La Scala in the 2023-24 season, there is delight in the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. As you would expect, it’s a bonfire of Valhalla vanities; with giant stony skulls, Siegfried’s metal-riven forge, smoke-smeared skies, greased with the dead. But throughout the sections, sketches and models jostle with the final product. Most striking is a 1:25 scale model, a beautifully detailed painting of a skull discovered staring at a spot below us; as if the owner died crouching. Adjacent are grainy panels of petrified tree-bark, with penciled glyphs scratched runically over at one point.
McVicar at Chicago in 2013 forged something different with Macfarlane. Dvorak’s 1900 opera Rusalka featuring mermaids and fish-head waiters, beckons in a rare swirl of sea-grey and grey-green. It allows a mermaid’s face to be gently smutched before our eyes.
If you think Tchaikowsky’s 1876 ballet Swan Lake might at least notate a similar swirl, this 2018 production again with Liam Scarlett (1986-2021) is in fact detailed, with vast palace-like edifices. They are pink and red-shadowed, dwarfing an almost realist set of figures in period dress. Indeed, there are daytime images, scenes outside gates and women attired in recognizably 1870s dresses. Some sketches date from 2019: for Macfarlane every production revived marks a work in progress. Macfarlane returned to a moon-haunted dark, only rent open by that moon, and night clouds briefly flicker overhead. It’s even darker. This isn’t so much a revisiting as a requiescat for Scarlett.
At the New York Met in 2017, McVicar and Macfarlane address Puccini’s vestigially historical Tosca. They go for the nihilists: there is a startling slew of scarlet like an Angel of Death realized as if a bucket of blood slops over a backdrop. Maybe Agent of Death might be closer. The last years of the nineteenth-century produced obsessions with nihilism and revolution. Conrad ‘s Nostromo and The Secret Agent were not far off, and in Hampstead Kropotkin was preaching peace while Lenin was asking, “What is to be done?” and coming up with much blood. There was Voynich’s The Gadlfy and Giordano’s two revolutionary-inflected operas in 1896, and Fedora in 1898, which was ‘contemporary’, stuffed with nihilists. Two years on Puccini knew a fashion when he saw one, even if like Chenier he gestures to another era. And Macfarlane who picks up more 1900 retro than the wisp of early nineteenth-century Puccini played with, reverts to stone prisons as you would expect: but absolutely monochrome. This is nightmare unrelieved by “Vissi d’arte” or Cavaradossi’s warmth. The sketches of Castel Sant’Angelo like that angel of blood are visitations of fin-de-siècle Decadence.
Finally, Tchaikovsky’s 1889 Sleeping Beauty, which was to have been produced in 2024, was cancelled when Scarlett was first dismissed from the Royal Ballet in 2021; then took his own life. At 76 Macfarlane might not pause; but he does so here.
VI
Macfarlane has deservedly curated his productions of choice, taken nearly all the photographs and invited the essays. He found it “an interesting but not always comfortable experience.” One might regret the omission of more of his work on mid-twentieth-century opera, but the list of productions proves a readiness to work on this usually much darker material. Probably the shock of presenting more familiar works through Macfarlane’s treatment proved irresistible. Of Britten there is A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1988), his 1994 Peter Grimes and Shostakovich’s 1934 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 2004. There are many others including Ravel’s two operas, Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale and Puccini’s rare La Ronde.
Macfarlane has worked on Britten and Berg-derived compilations too. He seems not to have worked on Janacek or a Berg opera. Some other of Britten’s operas doubtless sing to Macfarlane: if only McVicar or another collaborator felt they could mount them. In particular, the 1971 ‘Cinderella’ TV opera Owen Wingrave, based on a Henry James story begs for Macfarlane to transform it. Inspired by Vietnam, and featuring a pacifist from a scornful military family, dared by his cruel fiancée to spend a night in a haunted ancestral-ridden room, it reeks of Macfarlane’s imaginary prisons.
VII
Then there are the studio paintings. Macfarlane’s fluency is distilled. He has confined it to a bowl of eggs, one broken, a dirty plate and bread knife (several of these), that small cabbage, sprats in a black dish, a larger fish, pomegranates, some portraits. His ceaseless snatches at this table world time-travel from Manet through Sickert to the Colourists; to swing back into theatre images again.
Throughout his work processes it’s clear Macfarlane isn’t simply immersed in that process and lives along the line of production and music. That is unique in itself. It’s that Macfarlane brings a tragic vision to his designs: even those ostensibly not tragic at all. Those who work with him regularly, like McVicar and Finn, share it. Everyone else knows it on seeing a single production which is, as each contributor states here, “unforgettable”. Like those cloths, a lurid but humane greatness is stamped on every production. The fabric of a visionary.
