Setting the scene with John Macfarlane

Oct 29 2010 By Diane Parkes

Diane Parkes talks to Birmingham Royal Ballet designer John Macfarlane.

Designer John Macfarlane is promising audiences plenty of magical moments with the new Birmingham Royal Ballet Christmas production Cinderella.

John, who has spent the best part of two years working on designs for the full length work, knows he has a tough act to follow as he also designed the company’s perennially popular Nutcracker.

Twenty years have passed since John injected his own brand of wonder into The Nutcracker which was created by former BRB director Sir Peter Wright as a gift to Birmingham to mark the move of the ballet company to the city.

Now Cinderella is being created to music by Prokofiev by current director David Bintley as a gift to the city to mark 20 years since the move.

John admits he is aware of a certain amount of expectation as The Nutcracker is greatly loved in Birmingham.

“In the early days of working on this production I was thinking that this needs to be every bit as good as The Nutcracker but the longer I have worked on it the more I have realised that it is a very different piece and will have its own special moments,” he says.

“From the outset we knew that we wanted it to be quite a dark version of the fairy tale. It certainly isn’t Disney. When you remember that the story is actually about the abuse of the young girl Cinderella. And then you have those scenes where the sisters are so desperate to fit into the magic slipper that they are cutting their toes off.

“Because of that you need to think very seriously about how you want to portray certain scenes. For example at the beginning when you are in the kitchen you want a level of realism so there is no point in having a kitchen which fills the entire stage. You need it to be on a realistic scale and you need to really get the impression of Cinderella as totally abused and downtrodden.”

But once the Fairy Godmother arrives on the scene, Cinderella’s fortunes begin to change. And John is aiming to ensure that those changes are show-stopping moments.

“In The Nutcracker everyone remembers the scene where the Christmas tree grows and the fire turns,” he says. “In Cinderella we could have gone for just one major pivotal point. But this is a full length classical ballet with a story which has plenty of opportunities for imagination.”

Not surprisingly John is keeping the details of those moments close to his chest.