Edward Gordon Craig
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Edward Henry Gordon Craig (16 January 1872 – 29 July 1966), usually known as Gordon Craig, was a British actor, producer, director and scenic designer.
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[edit] Life
The illegitimate son of the architect Edward Godwin and actress Ellen Terry, Craig was born Edward Godwin 16 January 1872, in Railway Street, Stevenage in Hertfordshire, England, and baptized, at age 16, as Edward Henry Gordon. He took the surname Craig by deed poll at age 21.
In 1893, Craig married May Gibson and had four children: Rosemary, Robin, Peter, and Philip. With his lover Elena Mee he had two children, Nelly and Edward Carrick (1894-), art director of British motion pictures. With his lover the dancer Isadora Duncan, Craig had a daughter, Deirdre (1906-1913). Tragically, Deidre died by drowning at the age of seven. Edward Gordon Craig died in Paris in 1966 at the age of 94.
[edit] Work
To scrutinize the work of Edward Gordon Craig is to examine the nature of theatre itself. He was an actor, designer, director, theatre magazine writer and theatre theorist. Craig was the man who asserted that the director was ‘the true artist of the theatre’. He was also the man who suggested the controversial idea of doing away with actors in favor of marionettes. Craig designed and built elaborately symbolic sets. (his famous set composed of screens for the Moscow Hamlet proved impractical on the first performance. However the set was modified and worked to great effect for the remainder of the run). He also was the editor and chief writer for the first international theatre magazine Mask magazine.
He worked as an actor in the company of Sir Henry Irving, but became more interested in art, learning to carve wood under the tutelage of James Pryde and William Nicholson. His acting career ended in 1897, when he went into theatrical design.
Craig's first productions, George F. Handel's opera Acis and Galatea and Henrik Ibsen's The Vikings were produced in London. While neither of these performances were successes, they debuted Craig's revolutionary style to the world. In these first productions, he concentrated on keeping the designs simple so as to set off the movements of the actors and of light. In addition, he introduced the idea of a "unified stage picture" that covered all the elements of design.
After finding so little financial success in Britain, Craig set out for Germany in 1904. While there, he wrote one of his most famous works, the essay The Art of the Theatre which was later reprinted with the title On the Art of the Theatre. Craig also met with Constantin Stanislavsky and worked on his famous production of Hamlet with the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1912. After settling in Italy, Craig created a school of theatrical design with support from Lord Howard de Walden.
Craig's idea of using neutral, non-representational screens as a staging device is probably his most famous (or indeed infamous) scenographic concept. The Stanislavski/Craig production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912 has been well documented, but this has often overshadowed an examination of the screens themselves. His design for Hamlet was an application of a concept that he had worked on for some time. Indeed, in 1910 Craig filed a patent which described in considerable technical detail a system of hinged and fixed flats that could be quickly arranged to cater for both internal and external scenes.
Craig’s second innovation was with stage lighting. Doing away with the traditional footlights, Craig lit the stage from above and projectors were also placed at the back of the auditorium to light the actors from above the heads of the audience. Colour and light also became central to Craig’s stage conceptualizations.
“ …Under the play of this light, the background becomes a deep shimmering blue, apparently almost translucent, upon which the green and purple make a harmony of great richness.” (Craig in Bablet 1981)
The third remarkable aspect of Craig’s experiments in theatrical form were his attempts to integrate design elements with his work with actors. His mise en scene sought to articulate the relationships in space between movement and sound, and line and colour. Craig believed in the theatre of the craft of the director – a theatre where action, words, colour and rhythm combine in dynamic dramatic form (Brockett 1994).
All of his life, Craig sought to capture “pure emotion” or “arrested development” in the plays he worked on. Even during the years when no-one commissioned him to design or direct plays, Craig continued to stage models, conceive stage designs and work on directorial plans which never saw the light of performance. Craig brought the painter’s perspective to directing and the director’s perspective to stage design harnessing mood, movement and emotion in set design. He tried to consider the whole atmosphere of the stage. Craig believed that a director should approach a play with no preconceptions and he embraced this in his fading up from the minimum or blank canvas approach (Walton 1983).
As an engraver and a classical artist, Craig came to find inspiration in puppets and masks. In his article A Note on Masks in 1910 (Bablet 1981), Craig expounds the virtue of using masks as a mechanism for capturing the audience’s attention, imagination and ‘soul’. ‘Six expressions instead six hundred’ was his proclamation as Craig asked for the abdication of the actor from the throne of theatre. “…There is only one actor – nay one man (sic) who has the soul of the dramatic poet, and who has ever served as the true and loyal interpreter of the poet. This is the marionette…” (Walton 1983)
In 'On the Art of the Theatre' (Craig 1911), Craig writes an imaginary dialogue between a Playgoer and a Stage Director. In this dialogue, he examines the problems of the nature of stage directing and he suggests that the first dramatists were not playwrights but performers who made the first pieces of drama using action, words, line, colour and rhythm. Craig goes on to contend that only the director who seeks to truly interpret drama and commit to training in all aspects of dramatic art, can restore the ‘Art of the Theatre’ (Wills 1976). He goes on to explain how the craft of the director is central to the contemporary framework of drama. Maintaining that the director should seek faithful interpretation of the text, Craig pointed out that audiences go to the theatre to ‘see’ not hear ‘plays’. Of primary importance to Craig, was that a director must find the rhythm, movement, tone and colour of the text and that these elements are more fundamental than the play’s scene and staging details.
Among his ideas that have found their way into modern theatre practice is the idea of using the design elements within a production (scenery, costumes, lighting, etc.) in ways that transcend reality rather than simply representing them. These elements could create symbols by which a deeper meaning could be communicated. He was extremely difficult to work with.
Overall, Craig's influence on the development of stage design was considerable. He received the OBE and in 1958 was made a Companion of Honour.
Edward Gordon Craig was a true theatre visionary. He elucidated a symbolic theatre language where words, visions, shapes, sounds and colour combine. His ultimate refusal to direct or design any project over which he did not have complete control led to his complete withdrawal from the practical theatre world (Leiter 1994:84). Was Craig ultimately a theatrical dreamer “…incapable of realizing his paper projects…” (Leiter 1994:84) or a true multi-talented visionary of the theatre?
[edit] Further reading
- Bablet, D. The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig, Eyre Methuen, London, 1981.
- Brockett, O. History of the Theatre, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1994.
- Craig, E.G. On the Art of the Theatre, Methuen, London, 1911.
- Johnston, M. Directing Methods, Singleton Press, San Paolo, 1972.
- Leiter, S.L. The Great Stage Directors, Facts on File, New York, 1994.
- Steegmuller, F. Your Isadora: The Love Story of Isadora Duncan & Gordon Craig, New York: Random House, 1974.
- Walton, J.M. Craig on Theatre, Methuen, London, 1983.
- Wills, R. The Director in a Changing Theatre, Mayfield, Palo Alto, 1976.
