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John Napier (Designer) is an Associate Designer of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Notable productions for them include Macbeth, The Comedy of Errors, King Lear, Once in a Lifetime, Nicholas Nickleby, Hedda Gabler, Peter Pan, and Mother Courage. Productions for the Royal National theatre include Peter Shaffer's Equus, Trelawny of the Wells, Peter Pan, An Enemy of the People, and Candide. He designed Lohengrin and Macbeth, for Convent Garden, Idomeneo at Glyndebourne, The Devils for ENO and Nabucco for the Met. In the musical theatre, Napier designed CATS, Les Miserables, Starlight Express, Miss Saigon, and Sunset Boulevard, all seen worldwide. He also designed Time, Children of Eden, Burning Blue, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Jesus Christ Superstar in London's West End. He designed and co-directed Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas, now in its twelfth year. He designed Captain Eo starring Michael Jackson and Hook for Steven Spielberg. Design awards include SWET awards for King Lear and Lohengrin, and Olivier for Burning Blue, and Tony Awards for Nicholas Nickelby, CATS, Starlight Express, Les Miserables, and Sunset Boulevard. John Napier is a Royal Designer for Industry, a Fellow of the London Institute and a member of the American Academy of Achievement.

-A CATS Playbill

    This theatre has been substantially altered to create the setting for this production- "A giant playground for cats." Immediately we enter, the set is all around us stretching right past us up to the mezzanine. The designer, John Napier, has created a complete environmental space for the show, taking the audience "into a world which uses real objects to conjure up fantasy, that they may at first find slightly disorientating and perhaps make them wonder what is going to happen and how."
    When first discussing ways of staging CATS the production team felt that one importaint prerequisite was that they needed a theatre "where it would be possible to charge the atmostpher even before the performance begins" and that this would not be possible in a theatre with a traditional proscenium arch stage. In London, they rediscovered the New London Theatre with its revolving stage and flexible seating. For the production in New York, however, the Winter Garded Theatre was selected for its huge open spaces, which would offer a similar flexibility (in spite of its proscenium) and an even more intense theatricality (because of it). In devising a visual image for the show-the leap into the dark from script to stage-John Napier wanted to create "a world for CATS that would not only achieve a greater degree of intimacy with the audience than is possible in most conventional theatres but would also point up the humor of the show and its occasional whackiness." Here he has been able to use the whole theatre by giving the stage fingers stretching out into the audience, making hidden holes for surprise entrances and exits and even relocating some of the seats. Most members of the audience will find themselves surprisingly, almost irresistibly close to their performing area.
    He started work on the original designs in November 1980, and began trying to visualise a place where cats might congregate together, bearing in mind that he also had to incorporate maximum room for dancing. Everything in the resulting playground cum rubbish dump was constructed to a cat's scale-three and a bit times life size-huge garbage cans, an abandoned car, massive tires, bicycles, even used tubes of toothpaste, worn out Christmas decorations and lots of garbage from which the cats can improvise various disguises enabling them to tell the story from the objects they find lying around. John Napier and his team spent a considerable amount of time first dismantling large sections of the auditorium, redesigning other sections and then staring to rebuild it bit by bit. In most productions, the designer and his team can usually go out and buy the necessary props or improvise them in some way, but in CATS, although the set is made up of items we chuck out everyday, most have had to be made specifically to scale.
    When creating the costumes for each character John Napier has followed the hints of T. S. Eliot's text, blending together the cat and human elements. With all this in mind, the costumes are, in addition, naturally very flexible and easy to move in-an essential feature in a show which contains such an important dance element. Every cat has individual make-up, which also helps to project their personality.