Edward Gordon Craig: A Vision of Theatre

Christopher Innes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9789057021244
• eBook ISBN: 9781134403011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Edward Gordon Craig's ideas regarding set and lighting have had an enormous impact on the development of the theatre we know today.In this new and updated edition of his well-known study of Edward Gordon Craig, Professor Christopher Innes shows how Craig's stage work and theoretical writings were crucial to the development of modern theatre. This book contains extensive documentation and re-evaluates his significance as an artist, actor, director and writer. Craig is placed in historical context, and his productions are reconstituted from unpublished prompt-books, sketches, journals and correspondence. Most of the designs and photographs, and many of Craig's writings cited, are not available elsewhere in print. Readers will gain insight into a key period of theatrical history, the life of one of its most fascinating individuals, the nature of stage performance, and into revolutionary ideas that are still challenging today.

1

Prologue: The Argument

Gordon Craig is one of the key figures in the development of modern theater. His influence in the early decades of the century was crucial; and his vision of what theater might become continues to inform the work of some of the leading theater-artists today. But, in addition to the intrinsic significance of his ideas, any attempt to explore Craig’s visionary concepts offers a particular challenge in terms of theater-studies.

In a physical art such as theater, theory does not exist independent of the object, and can only be validated on the stage. Yet performance is notoriously transitory and evanescent. If theory depends on practice, how can it be evaluated when there is no opportunity to experience the stage-performances on which it is based? In a very real sense the past is unavailable; and Craig’s case is particularly difficult, since he mounted relatively few productions. However, for these there happens to be a considerable amount of detail that has been preserved. This is partly because Craig was intensely aware that he was attempting something completely new, which meant that he recorded his aims and made notes on his rehearsals – partly because he was continually attempting to find financial backing for his ideas, and so commented extensively on what had been achieved – partly because he became involved in writing and publishing theatrical journals, which led him to keep any material that might serve as a resource for articles – and partly because of the centrality of design in his work (costume and set designs being one element of theater that does provide physical evidence). In addition, since Craig had persuaded the theater-world of the time that his work was revolutionary, reviews of his productions were remarkably detailed. Thus it becomes possible to reconstruct to a large degree what actually occurred on the stage, and even (taking into account not only reviews, but correspondence with and by his collaborators) audience response.

One of the intentions of this study is therefore to demonstrate how productions from the past can be reconstructed, by combining evidence from promptbooks, designs, rehearsal notes, stage-photographs, programmes, correspondence and newspaper reviews. The aim is to show what Craig achieved on the stage, and to relate this to his theories, in order to evaluate his vision of theater – but also to provide a model for theater-studies: what might be called an archeology of performance.

At the same time the task demonstrates some of the problems in doing this even for modern theater, since such material tends to be scattered. Indeed, in the case of Craig this is particularly acute. Although he collected and preserved so much of the necessary evidence, historical circumstances have spread it widely across the world. Craig not only worked in Germany, Russia and Italy, as well as England, but he also spent the latter part of his life in France. And when in old age and impoverished, he was negotiating the sale of his collection with American University libraries, the French government declared his work a “national treasure” and forced a sale (for a considerably lower price) to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. As a result, Craig would offer pieces from his collection to the admirers who visited him at his house in Venice. These included American scholars such as Arnold Rood, and enthusiasts such as Norman Philbrick. In addition, Craig had two families of children – one legitimate, although he had abandoned them at the turn of the century; and one from a “common-law” marriage – and he died without making a will. The children of his second marriage, who had participated in his work and cared for him in his final illness, but would have had no legal claim to inheritance, packed up several trunkloads of material; and shipped them out of France before declaring Craig’s death. These papers and documents were then sold piecemeal to various archives in the U.S. So, although the Bibliotheque Nationale claims to hold “the Craig Collection”, in actuality a large amount of important material, particularly relating to Craig’s theatrical plans, is in the Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas, or at the University of California in Los Angeles. Other material created by Craig is at the London Theater Museum (to which the Rood collection has also been donated), in the British Library, in the Harvard Theater Library at Boston, or in Stanford (where the Philbrick collection has gone). There is also a collection of Craig’s designs in Japan, and material relating to his work with Stanislavski in Moscow. This means that in order to build up a picture of any given production, material must be collated from widely separated sources; and the task is further complicated because Craig recorded his ideas in three different series of hand-written books: “Daybooks” for general thoughts and plans, “Notebooks” for specific concepts, and “MS books” as well as Sketchbooks. For instance, the prompt book, original set and costume designs for, say, Craig’s 1901 production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea are at the BN. However, the “Daybook” for that period is in the HRC, while the “Notebook” is at UCLA, who also have stage photos. Other photos are in London, together with newspaper reviews and background material on the theater of the time, while related correspondence is in three of the different archives.

This, in a sense, is quite appropriate, since Craig was an internationalist, as well as having a diverse career, which covered almost every area of theater.

In 1890, at the age of eighteen, Gordon Craig was hailed as the most promising young actor in England. Ten years later he had turned his back on the conventional stage and devoted himself to a vision of theater so radical that it seemed to have no place for the actor at all. His work as a director established techniques that have become axioms of modern stagecraft, but his theories were so extreme that they had little chance of being accepted or even understood. He was an enigma from the first, and for almost a century has been one of the most fought-over names in world theater. He was one of the innovators who shaped the development of modern theater, yet the exact extent of his influence is almost impossible to measure. His early productions introduced revolutionary techniques of lighting and new principles of grouping and scene design that are now accepted without question. Yet these productions had little direct impact. Practically no other theatrical reformer saw them and the information to reconstruct them has only recently become available. Craig was a leader without clearly identifiable followers, yet a magnet for almost all who reacted against realistic staging; a director with only seven mature productions he could call his own, who denied that even these were true examples of his theatrical concept. He was a founder-member of the new movement that included Copeau and Jouvet, Appia and Reinhardt, Tairov and Vaktangov, Poel and Granville-Barker – but unlike those others, who have won general recognition, Craig has never commanded any critical consensus. From the first, his work either attracted exaggerated praise or was rejected out of hand.

On the one side, artists such as Yeats hailed him as a theatrical messiah. Indeed, by 1931 his early collaborator, Martin Shaw, could fairly claim that Craig was “acknowledged by most people on the continent… to be the most significant force in the theatre today.” On the other, standard source books on twentieth-century staging tend to dismiss his work (together with Appia’s) as representative of a “synthetic movement.” Because it “produced no new plays and no new actors,” it is taken to be merely a superficial “scenic reform in which suggestive simplicity covered with ‘a veil of light or darkness’ the clumsy literalism of the naturalists’ ‘tasteless parlour’…”¹

This tendency to see Craig solely as a scene designer, and therefore to dismiss his vision as an attempt to substitute visual spectacle for drama, is an all-too-common error. Even Isadora Duncan, whose dancing inspired Craig and confirmed his belief that the essential element of his art had to be movement, referred to his work only as “the perfect setting” – which led Craig to exclaim that “even after 20 years… she thought I was thinking of scenery!”² The unfortunate fact is that, having no steady income from productions, Craig lived mainly by exhibiting and publishing his designs. Because designs can be easily reproduced, this is the sole aspect of his work that became generally known, apart from one collection of essays. So it has been all too easy to assume that his theatrical reform was limited to stage settings, whatever Craig himself claimed. This is also partly because his drawings have such artistic merit, partly because he misleadingly labeled one of the prototypes for his new theater as “Scene,” and partly because innovations are easier to carry out in scene design than in any other element of staging. Indeed this mistaken emphasis has made it possible to ignore the real implications of Craig’s theories, because (as the commercial theater repeatedly demonstrates) a style of setting or lighting can be used completely independently of any aesthetic values it was created to express. But Craig always insisted that he was a director, a metteur-en-scène, vehemently rejected the view that he was primarily a designer of scenes, and denied that scenery was anything more than one of many elements in his concept of theater. For him, the essential qualification for a director was acting experience, and he defined a “designer” as anyone with a specifically theatrical vision.

As evidence about the other aspects of his theatrical work has emerged, the critical pendulum has swung more in Craig’s favor. However, by now so much time has passed since Craig’s major involvement with the stage that his ideas are usually treated as historical curiosities, rather than as the inspiration to the present that he intended them to be. This is reinforced by the way he presented his work – stressing the continuity with tradition as well as the decisive break with it – and by the number of elements in his productions that in fact harked back to the nineteenth-century theater, which they were designed to replace. The paradox was summed up in one of Craig’s obituaries, which labeled him “the last Victorian of the English stage and the first prophet of a new order in the theatre, an order still in the making, and, some would add, incapable of being made.”³ As such, however, his vision not only helps to illuminate a past turning point in stage history, out of which our modern theater evolved. It also offers a continuing challenge, one that the post-modern movement in contemporary theater has picked up. Indeed the ideas that Craig formulated lead directly to the work of a designer-director like Robert Wilson. As we go into a new millennium, Craig’s concept is again at the cutting edge of theatrical innovation.

The case against Craig was perhaps put most trenchantly by Lee Simonson in 1931, and the terms of his attack deserve note if only because they have been picked up unthinkingly and repeated frequently. But his criticisms also bring out unintentionally the real issues that shaped the unusual course of Craig’s career: How much can be achieved by working within an established tradition, when the aim is to change it so radically that in effect it will become a new art form – and how can the true qualities of this new art be understood, when the terms that might be used to describe it can only be drawn from the form it is meant to supersede? Simonson’s argument was that it is absurd to extol someone (as Craig’s converts did) “as the source of every important innovation in designing stage settings” over the past twenty-five years when that person had not staged any work he could call solely his own during that whole period. Craig’s withdrawal from practical theater is explained as “a flight from reality” following the shock of “defeat” in his early productions, which led him to make extravagant demands – a specially constructed stage and sole artistic control – in order to avoid any test of his theories. This “fear of failure” is then taken as support for the contention that Craig’s designs are – and perhaps at least subconsciously were even intended to be – unrealizable on the stage, and his essays are dismissed as “a maze of suggestions… a mass of evasions and contradictions.” The fact that Craig never managed to put his ideas into practice, even though this was at a time when a wide range of experimental art theaters was able to find support, is offered as proof that those ideas are incoherent and impracticable. The only way his apparent importance can then be explained is by characterizing him as “a demagogue … an exalted mountebank.”⁴

Ironically, the passion of this denunciation itself indicates how dominant Craig’s influence is felt to be. But, leaving that aside, from a different perspective the qualities singled out as flaws are precisely what gives Craig’s work much of its value. His retreat from the stage was a refusal to compromise with existing conditions that would have destroyed the integrity of his ideas. So was his demand for autonomy and complete control of anything he produced. This assertion of the right to be in sole charge of every element in a production – orchestrating light, music, movement, the setting, and the actors, so that a performance became the work of a single artist – was hardly new. Dramatists such as Goethe and actor-managers such as Macready had called for it up to a century before as the only means of achieving artistic unity. The need for integrating the diverse elements of an increasingly spectacular and technically complex theater was the reason for the rise of the director, and it was largely Craig’s claims that legitimized the modern director’s position. A generation before, the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, able to exercise autocratic control because of his social position, had demonstrated what was possible. But it was Craig who provided the theoretical justification for the preeminence of the director as the only way to implement synaesthetic ideals of theatrical performance in which all the different art forms are integrated to create a single emotional harmony. On this level at least he could be said to have shaped one of the determining factors of twentieth-century theater. At the same time, in his own case this claim ruled out what might otherwise have been potentially valuable collaborations with better-established directors such as Reinhardt, even when they shared many of the same principles.

Because Craig saw his work as the antithesis of all accepted theatrical standards, even critical acclaim became suspect, because it meant that his productions fulfilled those conventional expectations he rejected. So it was hardly surprising that, at the very time he was writing his first major theoretical statement, “On the Art of the Theatre,” he remarked, “The nearer I come to success the more form and beauty I see in what’s called failure.”⁵ His series of early operatic productions between 1900 and 1902 in fact did correspond to the type of experimental “art theatre” Simonson claims he avoided because of the impracticability of his theories. But Craig moved beyond that possibility as his ideas developed. He came to see that such a framework could only promote partial reforms reforms: that represented innovations in technique and presentation, rather than a completely new art form.

If so many of Craig’s ideas seem negative, it is because his concept of what theater might become could not be realized (as Isadora Duncan noted in the margin of “On the Art of the Theatre”) until “the great incubus of the present theatre is destroyed… leaving CLEAR SPACE.” If his essays seem impressionistic and imprecise, exaggerated and enthusiastic, that is because they were intended as a fundamental challenge to all preconceptions. It is true that there is a strong vein of mysticism in Craig’s vision, yet on a practical level any coherent manifesto would have been too limiting. The value of Craig’s theories, like those of Antonin Artaud a generation later, is precisely that they free the imagination instead of providing a specific program. Indeed this can be seen as one reason why Craig deliberately turned from producing tangible examples of his new art of the theater – although he continued to experiment privately on model stages – and instead turned to writing.

In a critical commentary on one of the early books dealing with his work, which described him as one of “the three giants who led the charge” against realism (the others being Appia and Reinhardt), Craig made the distinction between visionaries such as himself, who acted as catalysts for change, and “organizers” like Reinhardt or Stanislavski, who put new artistic ideas into practice at the expense of popularizing them. At the same time Craig was alive to the contradictions inherent in the attempt to revolutionize the most physical of all art forms, which in a sense only exists in performance, by moving into abstractions. Finding himself labeled as “fundamentally a theorist,” he insisted that practical experience was the basis of all his work: “I acted and produced long before I dreamt of enunciating any theory.” Even while formulating his theories he had noted that though knowledge of stage history, paradoxically, was a prerequisite for meaningful change, “the more an artist studies the theatre the further he finds himself from the theatre.”⁶ So in one sense the critics who labeled Craig’s work impractical were correct. Even the towering monoliths and shifting architectural shapes, the stairs and skies leading to infinity in his scene drawings, were not designed for the conventional stage, but were attempts “to record what is seen in the mind’s eye.” Yet his theater of the imagination was always conceived in concrete terms and precise dimensions that generally corresponded to those of a regular proscenium – apart from the single exception of a festival theater he envisaged with a stage opening 170 feet high. He demonstrated the “infinite sky” effect in his early productions, and frequently created scale models to show how designs would be translated into stage terms. Commenting on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century costume designs, he picked out technical drawings that showed the construction rather than the effect for spectators – “Is not one such plate of more true value to us than a hundred fantastic whirling designs by some studio painter?”⁷ – and many of his own costume designs indude detail on cut, texture, or fastenings. This combination of practical concern (taking all the conditions of the stage into account) and fantasy that breaks out of conventional limitations is characteristic of Craig’s work as a whole.

When he came to write his autobiography, Index to the Story of My Days, Craig originally planned to focus on his stage work. The first section would “describe the conditions of 1899… so you may see what it is I thought I would change and how I would change it… Secondly my first seven productions… Then must come a break in the story and we must see what others are doing.”⁸ The final section was to be a description of the forms he had evolved to embody his vision of a new theater: the abstract choreography of moving geometrical shapes that he called Scene, and the production plans for festival performances of The St. Matthew Passion. He admonished himself to “write only of the mise-en-scène.” But, despite all this, his autobiography turned out to be a chronological diary concentrating on personal relationships, beginning on January 16th, 1872, the day of his birth, and breaking off in 1907 before he started publishing The Mask, the journal that became the major vehicle for his ideas, and before he developed his theories in such essays as “The Actor and the Übermarionette” and “The Artists of the Theatre of the Future.”

Craig – passionate, improvident, mercurial, a self-taught genius who mastered almost everything except self-discipline and who scattered his energy among multitudinous projects; dogmatic yet secretly self- doubting, whimsical as well as visionary – comes across in his Index to the Story of My Days. His personality is also described by Edward Craig in his bio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Prologue: The argument
• 2. Scene changes: Victorian theater, an acting career, and points of departure
• 3. A rising action: Design and movement
• 4. Problem drama: Texts and performers
• 5. A play of ideas: Principles, theory, and an Übermarionette
• 6. Toward a new theater: Masques, screens, and a Hamlet
• 7. The theater of the future: Scene, puppets, and a religious festival
• 8. Final bow: A school and the printed word
• 9. Curtain call: Craig’s vision and contemporary theater
• 10. Programme notes: Craig on theater
• Edward Gordon Craig, 1872–1966: A theatrical chronology
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index