John Macfarlane was born in Glasgow and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. He spent the first fifteen years of his career primarily working in dance. For Jiří Kylián and the Nederlands Dans Theater, he designed the sets for Songs of a Wayfarer, Les Noces, Dreamtime, L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Piccolo Mondo, L’Histoire du soldat, Forgotten Land, and Tantz-schul. He also collaborates regularly with Glen Tetley: The Firebird (Royal Danish Ballet), Wiegenlied (Vienna State Opera Ballet), La Ronde and Tagore (Canadian National Ballet), and Dialogues (Dance Theater in Harlem).
He has also worked on classical ballet repertoire, designing Giselle (Royal Ballet) and The Nutcracker (Royal Birmingham Ballet) for Sir Peter Wright, and Swan Lake (Munich).
In opera, John Macfarlane has designed sets for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Cologne Opera), Giulio Cesare (Scottish Opera; Theater im Pfalzbau, Ludwigshafen), Peter Grimes, Otello, Falstaff, and The Queen of Spades (La Monnaie, Brussels), La Clemenza di Tito (Paris National Opera), Boris Godunov (Amsterdam), and Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung (Royal Opera House, London), all directed by Willy Decker, with whom he collaborated again in 2006 for Idomeneo (Vienna Opera).
For Francesca Zambello, he designed the sets and costumes for Benvenuto Cellini (Grand Théâtre de Genève), The Barber of Seville (Santa Fe), and War and Peace (Paris National Opera).
He has collaborated with Richard Jones on Hänsel und Gretel (Olivier Award) and The Queen of Spades (Royal Philharmonic Award) at Welsh National Opera, Euryanthe at the Glyndebourne Festival (Olivier Award), Les Troyens at English National Opera, and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, L’Heure espagnole, and Gianni Schicchi at the Royal Opera House, London (Olivier Award).
John Macfarlane also works with David McVicar, for whom he designed sets and costumes for Agrippina and Don Giovanni at La Monnaie, The Magic Flute at the Royal Opera House, London, and Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. He designed the sets for Ravel-Puccini at the Royal Opera House, Hänsel und Gretel at the Metropolitan Opera, and The Fairy’s Kiss with the Royal Ballet of Birmingham.

John MacfarlaneSet designer