Patricia Linton talks to the artist Jock McFadyen about his work on the designs for Kenneth MacMillan’s The Judas Tree. We hear about Jock’s own rebellious days as a student and about how, as a complete newcomer to ballet, he became involved in The Judas Tree. He quickly realised that he preferred narrative to abstract ballet – Goya to Mondrian, as he puts it – and about how he saw Kenneth MacMillan as the Francis Bacon of ballet. Disclaiming any knowledge of a deeper religious meaning to the ballet, Jock speaks of the difficulty of representing a rape in ballet, and also of MacMillan’s conflicted attitude to authority, with his worries about Princess Margaret being offended by the explicitness of Jock’s sets.

The intrview is introduced by the philosopher Anthony O'Hear in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Jock McFadyen was born in Glasgow in 1950. His family moved to Stoke-on-Trent when he was fifteen. He went to art school before being thrown out when he was seventeen, but eventually went to the Chelsea School of Art in 1973. After graduating with a BA in 1976 and an MA in 1977, he quickly established a reputation for his gritty pictures of working class life in the inner cities. Deborah MacMillan saw some of his work in an exhibition in Cork Street, as a result of which McFadyen was engaged to work on the designs of her husband, Kenneth MacMillan’s last ballet, The Judas Tree in 1991. Partly as a result of his work on this set, representing London’s Docklands, McFadyen began to work on evocative urban and later rural landscapes. McFadyen was elected to the RA in 2012, and his work is in many major public galleries both in Britain and overseas.

Photo: Jock McFadyen with his painting Great Junction Street, 1998; Credit: © Ian Georgeson Photography

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