Ian first joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1975. His productions there include The Wizard of Oz, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour's Lost, Twelfth Night, A Christmas Carol, The Relapse, Troilus and Cressida and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Other credits include:
The Rivals and King Lear at the Old Vic; Banana Ridge, One For The Pot and Peter Pan at the Shaw Festival in Canada; Macbeth (Sydney Theatre Company); Henry VIII and Love for Love for Chichester Festival Theatre and Macbeth at the Sydney Theatre Company, Australia.

Opera repertoire includes:
Madama Butterfly, Tosca, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Carlos, Roméo et Juliette, Tannhäuser and Die Gezeichneten (Los Angeles); The Tales of Hoffmann (Sydney Opera, Houston, Opera Pacific); Faust, The Merry Widow, Cav/Pag, La Belle Vivette, Don Quixote, Mefistofele (ENO) also at the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires; Der fliegende Holländer, Simon Boccanegra 1857 & 1881 versions (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden); Simon Boccanegra 1881 (Washington, Dallas); Macbeth (Cologne) and Faust, Tosca, Macbeth, Boris Godunov, Acis & Galatea and Attila for Opera North; Norma for Scottish Opera and Buhnen Graz; La Bohème (Mariinsky Theatre (Kirov), St Petersburg), The Mikado (Savoy Theatre), Salome (New York City Opera) and Falstaff (Theatre du Châtelet, Paris); Tannhäuser (Madrid).

Musicals include:
Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (Bloomsbury Theatre); The Swan Down Gloves and The Wizard of Oz, RSC; Oh Kay!, Chichester Festival Theatre; Bitter Sweet, Sadler’s Wells & UK tour; A Little Night Music (Piccadilly Theatre, London); Show Boat (London Palladium and UK Tour); West Side Story (Australia and New Zealand) and the London Premiére of The Roar of the Greasepaint - The Smell of the Crowd.

Recent works include:
Roméo et Juliette in Chicago; Tosca, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Carlo and a new production of Tannhäuser in Los Angeles; and the first production in nearly 50 years of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sir John in Love at the English National Opera. He has recently directed a new production of Der fliegende Holländer for the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. In 2009 he made his debut at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto (“Dora” Award Nomination, Best Opera Production 2009), and staged Tannhäuser at the Teatro Real, Madrid. His production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream recently played at the Britten Theatre, London, and he has recently staged the North American Premiere of Schrekers' DIE GEZEICHNETEN in Los Angeles.