Artist and stage designer John Macfarlane has created stunning sets for shows across the globe but there was one story he really wanted to work on – Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella.
So when former Birmingham Royal Ballet Director David Bintley decided to create a new production of Cinderella for 2010, John was delighted to be given the task.

“Cinderella was the one I wanted to do,” he recalls. “It’s always attracted me because of the music. For such a well-known story, the music is very dark and I think most artists and designers are always more inspired by something dark and magical. With Cinderella there’s so much for you to play with.”

John had worked with BRB in 1990 designing the iconic sets for the company’s production of The Nutcracker – a show which is greatly loved and still wows audiences most Christmases. But this was the first time he had collaborated with David Bintley.

“When David asked me to do Cinderella I was delighted, not just to work on Cinderella but also to work with him. That was the one chance we got to work together.

“I think in a sense the best experiences you have are when the person who is asking you to do something is on the same wavelength as you are. Then the discussion is quite minimal because you both want the same thing. He wanted to bring out the dark side as well and seemed very easy with what I was doing.”

A gift from David to Birmingham to celebrate the 20th anniversary of BRB’s move to the city, Cinderella premiered at Birmingham Hippodrome in November 2010 where it received critical acclaim and thrilled audiences.

With Cinderella being such a familiar story, the production needed to give audiences a tale they recognized but also provide plenty of suspense and surprises.

“My starting point is always ‘don’t make it too pretty.’ None of these big classic ballets are lovely cuddly stories,” John explains.

“The contrast in Cinderella’s circumstances is absolutely critical to the ballet. You have to believe in the first scenes of Cinderella to then see the contrast. There’s very little light music in that first scene with her in the kitchen so it should be like there’s no hope for her.

“If you don’t feel that then you don’t get this lovely moment when suddenly the fire pops out and something clearly magical is going to happen. If something magical doesn’t happen at that point you are going to shortchange your audiences as the audience is going to be coming in asking how is she going to the ball, how will the ball end, how will they do the clock?”

John’s transformation scene from ash girl Cinderella to belle of the ball is indeed magical – not least as the lizards, frogs and mice of the kitchen become her attendants.
“I was going to do lizard footmen whether anyone wanted them or not because I absolutely love designing characters with animal heads,” laughs John. “In Cinderella it is really important that you have this world that the Fairy Godmother builds. She takes the little critters from the kitchen, as Disney and many people before him did, and she turns them into coachmen and pages and all the magical things that take Cinderella to the ball.”

John painstakingly ensured the creatures were accurately portrayed. “It’s like when I did the rats for Nutcracker,” he says. “You have to be anatomically correct and they have to look real so I did about four or five sheets of detailed drawings of lizards.

“As soon as they are beautifully made you believe in them completely – and the quirk in it is that the lizards are wearing baroque costumes with coats and tails and shirt fronts.”
When Cinderella arrives at the ball she brings the magic with her.

“The ballroom is very normal and then she appears and it opens up and it’s the night sky. That was always something I thought would be wonderful,” says John.

“And then of course the clock needed to be this terrifying moment when the whole thing falls apart. You can absolutely hear the clock in the music. That’s the wonderful thing about Prokofiev and also Tchaikovsky – you can always tell where you’re going.

“When you start working on something like Cinderella, you’ve got to really listen to the music. Prokofiev gives you lots of leads before the clock starts that great whirring of the mechanism in the same way that Tchaikovsky gives you lots of leads before Aurora gets her finger pricked in the garden in Sleeping Beauty.”

John has designed numerous works including Swan Lake and Sir Peter Wright’s Giselle for Royal Ballet, War and Peace for Opéra Bastille, Hansel and Gretel and Queen of Spades for Welsh National Opera and a host of productions for New York’s Metropolitan Opera including The Flying Dutchman and Tosca.

“I only really do a show once and I only do ballet and opera because the music is so critical for me. I’m an avid reader and yet I get nothing when I read a script. If it’s an opera or ballet then everything is informed by the music.

“I have this belief that every production from Elektra to Don Giovanni to Tosca, they all have these critical moments, some of them the audience are hugely aware of, some of them are hopefully a huge surprise, but they all have this path through.”

Creating the right setting for the tale also ensures the audience enters the world onstage and becomes captivated by the story.

“All those huge Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky ballets have great stories and as long as you keep the story central it will work. And you hopefully don’t let the audience expectation down.

“So with Cinderella at midnight you’ve got to really show the audience that all this wonderful dream ballroom scene and meeting the prince have suddenly gone at the stroke of the clock. Cinderella is back to square one.”

The production also has plenty of comedy not least in the Stepsisters who are hideously mean but also so outrageous they create their own humour.

“We wanted the Ugly Sisters to be cruel of course and not just slapstick and funny,” says John. “David was brilliant on that with this sort of creepy quirky choreography for them.”
And the production needed to finish not just with a fairy tale happy ending but also with a grand finale which reflected Prokofiev’s great score.

“I think the end of Cinderella is one of the most beautiful pieces of music Prokofiev ever wrote. And so we have the Fairy Godmother and the sun coming up and the stars. There’s a magic to it as they walk into sunset or sunrise.”

Birmingham Royal Ballet Cinderella is at Lowry, Salford from 6-8 March 2025. Following on from the UK tour, the production will then play at Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan in Japan (27 – 29 June).

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Why did the puppet need to be so big?

Stephen: “Shakespeare’s As You Like It ends with a great marriage ceremony. He asks for the God of Marriage to appear on stage and bless the couples. In other productions an actor might change costume and come back dressed as a god. But Kimberley Sykes (the director) and I wanted to make something bigger, to create a moment at the end that felt very different to the rest of the play.

“We looked at things like the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, where they do these huge events with big puppets – and then a little closer to home, Mervyn and I both remembered the Sultan’s Elephant, which was a huge marionette that went through London in 2006”.

Mervyn: “At Burning Man they have some things that are extraordinary pieces of engineering, made with artistic sensibility – so we knew the opportunity was there to make a piece of sculpture on a massive scale that was also able to move dramatically”.

What were the initial steps in creating Hymen?

Stephen: “The first step in the design process was to research the traditional image of Hymen – surprisingly Hymen turns out to be male, but we decided to make him in to something slightly more androgynous.

“I’ve certainly never designed a huge puppet on this scale. That takes a very particular skill so we got in touch with Mervyn Millar and his company Significant Object, and asked for his help. I’m delighted he came on board”.

Mervyn: “Stephen and Kimberley already had a strong concept when they came to me. They showed me some drawings and asked if what they wanted to create could be done, and whether I could help.

“We did some more drawings, and then we had to work out how we could realise that on stage. We had to work out how the actors would operate it, whilst ensuring it could work reliably for over a year’s worth of performances”.

How did the design process develop?

Stephen: “We had a computer scan of him created, and a full-size polystyrene head, from which we then cast the materials that created the real head. It’s made from a very simple, almost hat-like material called variform, which you can heat and mould and bend over objects. We also had to make the ‘skin’ and the ‘bones’, and the skeleton had to be a metal structure to ensure it was durable. Alongside that we also had a ‘muscle’ layer which was all made in wood”.

Mervyn: “We created smaller versions of Hymen and did some work on the computer, but it’s not until you get the final object in the room, when you can handle it, that you can really begin to understand how the joints are going to move and what kind of adjustment it will need. So there was a lot of experimenting and testing the joints”.

Creating a puppet on this scale must require a lot of people. Can you tell us about who else was involved?

Stephen: “I don’t think we’ve ever built anything quite like it here at the RSC, so with Mervyn’s expert advice and skill we pulled together a team from our Scenic Workshops, who make all our sets and props. Quite early on we learnt we needed carpentry, prop making and scenic painting skills, people who could work with a range of materials, particularly people who worked with metal to advise us on what the joints would be like. It was a wonderfully collaborative process”.

Mervyn: “The RSC has an amazing group of skilled people: brilliant carpenters, painters and metalworkers who’ve got loads of experience, and a technical design team who are willing to take on anything. I have to say the experience was really pleasurable, and the attitude of the staff fantastic.

“One of the reasons I love puppetry is because it brings all the different technologies of the theatre together into one space. It’s got movement, it’s got performance, it’s got design. And it’s always satisfying when everyone’s skills coalesce into this dynamic theatre object”.

When was Hymen integrated into rehearsals?

Mervyn: “Because this puppet is so big, all of the testing of the mechanics had to happen in the workshops. With a smaller puppet, you might make a prototype, send it into the rehearsal rooms and then bring it back onto the workbench and fiddle a bit more. That just wasn’t possible on this project”.

Stephen: “I was keen to try and introduce the puppet into rehearsals as soon as possible, but it became increasingly clear we couldn’t. Our rehearsal rooms in London aren’t big enough or high enough to get him in. We managed to get him ready for the last week of rehearsals when we had moved up to Stratford.

“Before that, the actors had spent weeks and weeks with broomsticks, baskets on sticks and lots of sellotape over things so they could get a sense of how big the puppet was going to be. I’m guessing few quite guessed the scale until we introduced him on their first day in Stratford!”

How are you hoping the audience will react to Hymen?

Mervyn: “It’s a huge figure. It may be made of steel, aluminium, wood, mesh, tissue paper, moss, leaves and all sorts of strange things, but you want the audience to believe in it. When he’s on stage he breathes, looks around the auditorium, and his arms reach out into the space. The audience knows it’s a puppet, but I hope they forget that, and believe the character has come to life”.

Stephen: “I’m hoping audiences will feel the enjoyment, and, if you like, the playfulness of this character, and enjoy that wonderful suspension of disbelief that you can get with puppets – even though we all know they’re inanimate objects!

“It happens in Peter Pan doesn’t it? You know, there’s that wonderful moment where they address the audience and say, “Does anyone believe in fairies?” and anyone will cheer and scream, however cynical they are, however many times they’ve been to the theatre. I certainly got it when I went to watched War Horse. To just experience what is really a few canes and bits of fabric, you utterly believe it’s a living breathing horse. It was great to discover that Mervyn had been a part of that journey too – to work on those puppets, and so then I knew that we were already onto a winner with Hymen.

“There’s just something rather wonderful when the audience buys into it, and they want to believe it’s come alive, and I think for me, that’s the essence of theatre”.

The Royal Shakespeare Company is touring to The Lowry, Salford from 25 September to 5 October 2019.

Read our interview with As You Like It director, Kimberley Sykes.

The post Making Hymen, the God of Marriage, for the RSC’s As You Like It appeared first on Quays Life.