Edward Gordon Craig

For other uses, see Edward Craig.

Edward Gordon Craig
Born	16 January 1872(1872-01-16) Stevenage Hertfordshire, England
Died	29 July 1966(1966-07-29) (aged 94) Vence, France
Occupation	Stage designer Theatre director Theatre theorist Actor
Nationality	English
Period	Modernism
Literary movement	Symbolism
Notable work(s)	The Art of the Theatre (1905) The Mask (1908-1929) MAT production of Hamlet (1911-1912)
Spouse(s)	May Gibson

Edward Henry Gordon Craig (16 January 1872 – 29 July 1966), sometimes known as Gordon Craig, was an English modernist theatre practitioner; he worked as an actor, director and scenic designer, as well as developing an influential body of theoretical writings. Craig was the son of revered actress Dame Ellen Terry.

The Gordon Craig theatre, built in Stevenage (the town of his birth), was named in his honour in 1975.

Life

Craig's mother, Ellen Terry, ca. 1880

The illegitimate son of the architect Edward Godwin and actress Ellen Terry, Craig was born Edward Godwin on 16 January 1872 in Railway Street, Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, England, and baptised at age 16 as Edward Henry Gordon. He took the surname Craig by deed poll at age 21.

Craig spent much of his childhood (from the age of 8 in 1889 to 1897) backstage at the Lyceum Theatre, where his mother was the leading lady to actor Sir Henry Irving. Craig later wrote an especially vivid, book-length tribute to Irving. Whether Irving's spectacularly successful relationship with Ellen Terry was romantic as well as professional has been the subject of much historical speculation. Most of their correspondence was burned by her descendants. According to Michael Holroyd, "when Irving was dead, Marguerite Steen asked Ellen whether she really had been Irving's lover, and she promptly answered: 'Of course I was. We were terribly in love for a while.' But at earlier periods in her life, when there were more people around to be offended, she said contradictory things."

Whatever the nature of Terry's personal relationship with Irving, it never marred their work or their reputation. Even before the Lyceum years, when Ellen Terry ran off with bohemian artist Godwin and bore him two illegitimate children, Teddy (Craig himself) and Edith 'Edy' Craig, Ellen's charm triumphed over Victorian disdain. She was somehow able to maintain an exalted position in the hearts of her Victorian audiences, regardless of how much and how often her behaviour defied their strict moralities.

In 1893 Craig married May Gibson, with whom he had four children: Rosemary, Robin, Peter and Philip. With his lover Elena Meo he had two children, Nelly (1904–1975) and Edward Carrick (1905–1998; an art director of British films). With his lover, the dancer Isadora Duncan, Craig had a daughter, Deirdre (1906–13), who drowned at the age of seven. With his lover, the poet Dorothy Nevile Lees, Craig had a son, David Lees (1916–2004), a noted photojournalist.

Craig died at Vence, France, in 1966, aged 94.

Career

Further information: Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet

Craig as Hamlet, Olympic Theatre, 1897

Craig asserted that the director was "the true artist of the theatre" and, controversially, suggested viewing actors as no more important than marionettes. He designed and built elaborately symbolic sets; for instance, a set composed of his patented movable screens for the Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet. He was also the editor and chief writer for the first international theatre magazine, The Mask.

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, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Handel's Acis and Galatea (both inspired and conducted by his life-long friend Martin Shaw, who founded the Purcell Operatic Society with him to produce them), and Ibsen's The Vikings at Helgeland, were produced in London. The production of Dido and Aeneas was a considerable success and highly influential in reviving interest in the music of Purcell, then so little known that three copies of The Times review were delivered to the theatre: one addressed to Mr Shaw, one to Mr Craig, and one to Mr Purcell. Craig concentrated on keeping his designs simple, so as to set-off the movements of the actors and of light, and introduced the idea of a "unified stage picture" that covered all the elements of design.

After finding 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 (later reprinted with the title On the Art of the Theatre). In 1908, Isadora Duncan introduced Craig to Constantin Stanislavski, the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, who invited him to direct their famous production of Hamlet with the company, which opened in December 1911. After settling in Italy, Craig created a school of theatrical design with support from Lord Howard de Walden.

Craig was considered extremely difficult to work with and ultimately refused to direct or design any project over which he did not have complete artistic control. This led to his withdrawal from practical theatre production.

He received an OBE and in 1958 was made a Companion of Honour.

Ideas

Craig's 1908 design for Hamlet at Moscow Art Theatre (1911-12).

Craig's idea of using neutral, mobile, non-representational screens as a staging device is probably his most famous scenographic concept. 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. He presented a set to William Butler Yeats for use at the Abbey Theatre in Ireland, who shared his symbolist aesthetic.

Craig’s second innovation was in stage lighting. Doing away with traditional footlights, Craig lit the stage from above, placing lights in the ceiling of the theatre. Colour and light also became central to Craig’s stage conceptualisations.

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.

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 scène sought to articulate the relationships in space between movement, sound, line, and colour. Craig promoted a theatre focused on the craft of the director – a theatre where action, words, colour and rhythm combine in dynamic dramatic form.

All of his life, Craig sought to capture "pure emotion" or "arrested development" in the plays on which he worked. Even during the years when he was not producing plays, Craig continued to make models, to conceive stage designs and to work on directorial plans that were never to reach performance. He 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.

As an engraver and a classical artist, Craig found inspiration in puppets and masks. In his 1910 article "A Note on Masks," Craig expounds the virtue of using masks as a mechanism for capturing the audience’s attention, imagination and soul. "There is only one actor – nay one man who has the soul of the dramatic poet, and who has ever served as the true and loyal interpreter of the poet," he proclaimed, and "this is the marionette.”

On the Art of the Theatre (1911) is written as a dialogue between a Playgoer and a Stage Director, who examine the problems of the nature of stage directing. Craig argues that it was not dramatists, but rather performers who made the first works of drama, using action, words, line, colour and rhythm. Craig goes on to contend that only the director who seeks to interpret drama truly, and commits to training in all aspects of dramatic art, can restore the "Art of the Theatre." Maintaining that the director should seek a faithful interpretation of the text, Craig argues that audiences go to the theatre to see, rather than to hear, plays. The design elements may transcend reality and function as symbols, he thought, thereby communicating a deeper meaning, rather than simply reflecting the real world.

See also

• Leon Schiller — Craig's Polish director-colleague

Sources

• Bablet, Denis. 1981. The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig. London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0413478801.
• Brockett, Oscar G. and Franklin J. Hildy. 2003. History of the Theatre. Ninth edition, International edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0205410502.
• Craig, Edward Gordon. 1906. Isadora Duncan, Six Movement Designs. Leipsig.
• ---. 1911. On the Art of the Theatre. Ed. Franc Chamberlain. London: Routledge, 2008. ISBN 978-0415450348.
• Innes, Christopher. 1983. Edward Gordon Craig. Directors in Perspective ser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521273838.
• Holroyd, Michael. 2008. A Strange Eventful History. Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN 0701179872.
• Leiter, Samuel L. 1994. The Great Stage Directors: 100 Distinguished Careers of the Theatre. Illustrated ed. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0816026029.
• Skou, Ulla Poulse. 1973. Genier er som Tordenvejr - Gordon Craig på Det Kgl. Teater 1926. Selskabet for Dansk Teaterhistorie, 1973. In Danish, with 36 unpublished letters from Gordon Craig as an appendix in English.
• Steegmuller, Francis. 1974. Your Isadora: The Love Story of Isadora Duncan & Gordon Craig. Pub Center Cultural Resources. ISBN 978-0394486987.
• Taxidou, Olga. 1998. The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig. Contemporary Theatre Studies ser. volume 30. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. ISBN 9057550466.
• Walton, J. Michael. 1983. Craig on Theatre. London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0413472205.
• Wills, J. Robert. 1976. The Director in a Changing Theatre. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield. ISBN 978-0874843491.

External links

• Archival material relating to Edward Gordon Craig listed at the UK National Register of Archives