Edward Gordon Craig
Edward Gordon Craig
Edward Henry Gordon Craig
(born Jan. 16, 1872, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, Eng. — died July 29, 1966, Vence,
France) British actor, stage designer, and drama theorist. He was the son of Ellen
Terry. He acted with Henry Irving's company (1889 – 97) and then turned to
designing stage sets, decor, and costumes. He moved to Florence (1906), where he
opened the School for the Art of the Theatre (1913). His international journal The
Mask (1908 – 29) made his theatrical ideas widely known. His books On the Art of
the Theatre (1911), Towards a New Theatre (1913), and Scene (1923) outlined
innovations in stage design based on the use of portable screens and changing patterns
of light; his theories influenced the antinaturalist trends of the modern theatre.
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Edward Gordon Craig
(b Stevenage, 16 Jan 1872; d Vence, France, 29 July 1966). English theatre director,
designer, theorist, printmaker and typographer. He was one of the great, if
controversial, innovators of the modern theatre movement. The son of the actress
Ellen Terry and the architect Edward William Godwin, Craig was born into a strong
theatrical tradition. He abandoned a promising career as an actor with Henry Irving's
Lyceum Company in 1897 to concentrate on directing and developing ideas about 'the
theatre of the future'. Inspired by Hubert von Herkomer's scenic experiments with
auditorium lighting and three-dimensional scenery in productions at the Bushey Art
School, Herts, Craig exchanged the conventions of realistic scenery for a suggestive,
abstract interplay of form, light, movement and music. This new total theatre drew on
the imagination to create an architectonic vision of choreographic movement, colour
harmony, visual simplicity and atmospheric effect united under the sole control of a
single artist. Influenced by his relationship with the dancer Isadora Duncan, he also
proposed a concept of the rhythms and movements in nature acting as the vehicle for
an emotional and aesthetic experience.
Edward Gordon Craig
Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) was an important actor, designer, director, and
theoretician of the early 20th century European stage.
Edward Gordon Craig was born in 1872. He was the son of Edward Godwin, an
architect who also did stage designs, and Ellen Terry, one of the most revered
actresses of the English stage. Craig's own stage career began at the age of 12 when
he appeared as a gardener's boy with his mother at Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre. At
17 he was accepted into the Irving company, and for the next ten years Craig's
primary interest was in acting.
Despite Craig's successes as an actor, he ended that career at the age of 25. Part of the
reason for this early retirement was Craig's belief that his idol, Henry Irving,
personified the best in acting and that he, Craig, could contribute nothing more to the
stage than a copy of Irving's style. From his mentor Craig had learned valuable theater
lessons such as strict discipline in rehearsal; thorough rehearsal for a production
including the actors, the lighting, and the technical elements; and attention to detail.
Although these things seem standard today, they were innovations to early 20thcentury theater.
Another reason that Craig left acting was his distaste for realism - the imitation of life
- which was the predominant style of the period. As early as 1893 Craig had begun to
experiment with music and woodcuts retaining only dominant forms and masses. He
believed that art was not an imitation of life but rather an expression of the
inexpressible.
Surprisingly, Craig's first work as a director, No Trifling with Love (1893), at the
Uxbridge Town Hall, was executed in the style of historical realism. However, by
1899 he had developed his own form of theater which he displayed in his first major
work, a production of Dido and Aeneas. This innovative production took eight months
of rehearsal, included a cast of 80, introduced totally new lighting techniques, and
completely broke from the realistic tradition. Designed, directed, and choreographed
by Craig, the production evoked atmosphere and emotion rather than simply revealing
time and place.
In Craig's next production, The Masque of Love (1901), he continued to develop his
style, using three large cloths as the basis of the entire set and sacks stitched together
for the costumes - again simplicity and mass created the entire illusion.
Edward Gordon Craig's practical work was not extensive, yet it helped to
revolutionize the theater's growth in this century. In 1902 he directed and designed
Handel's Acis and Galatea; in 1903 he presented Bethlehem and two productions
which his mother acted in and produced, The Vikings and Much Ado about Nothing.
For several years Craig collaborated with other theater innovators, including Otto
Brahm, Max Reinhardt, and Eleanora Duse. One of his most famous projects was a
co-production with Stanislavsky (perhaps the most influential theater director/actor of
the 20th century) of Hamlet (1912). This production, known primarily for its
revolutionary setting of large moving panels, perhaps reveals the reasons that Craig
left the practical theater world.
Aside from his difficulties with personality conflicts (Craig was known as an
eccentric), his ideas were far ahead of his time. He believed in the director as the
ultimate creator, one who must initiate all ideas and bring unity to a production. He
created the idea of the actor as "ubermarionette," whose movement was not
psychologically motivated or naturalistic, but rather symbolic. The actor should be
like a mask for the audience to interpret. Finally, he introduced a new stagecraft - one
based on the magic of imagination rather than on everyday details.
If Craig's actual work was limited, and sometimes impractical because of technical
limitations, his writing was prolific. In 1898 he launched the theater journal The
Page; in 1908 The Mask (until 1929); and from 1918 to 1919 he wrote The
Marionette. He also published The Art of the Theatre (1905), On the Art of the Stage,
Towards a New Theatre, Scene, The Theatre Advancing, and Books and Theatres, as
well as biographies of Henry Irving and his mother.
Craig's work in the theater and his writings have influenced many of the 20th
century's innovators, including Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Brecht. He continued to
be a source of inspiration for many years - many of the ideas that he developed in the
early part of the 20th century were not realized on the stage until the 1980s. Edward
Gordon Craig died at the age of 94 in 1966.
Further Reading
The most important and inclusive of Craig's own works are On the Art of the Theatre
(1911) and Index to the Story of My Days (1957). For thorough examinations of
Craig's life and his work, including illustrations, see Denis Bablet's Edward Gordon
Craig (1981); Edward Craig, Gordon Craig: The Story of His Life (1968); J. Michael
Walton, Craig on Theatre (1983), which includes selections from Craig's writings;
and Laurence Senelick, Gordon Craig's Moscow Hamlet: A Reconstruction (1982).
Additional Sources
Carrick, Edward, Gordon Craig: the story of his life, New York: Limelight Editions,
1968, 1985.
Craig, Edward Gordon, Gordon Craig's Paris diary, 1932-1933, North Hills, Pa.:
Bird & Bull Press, 1982.
Craig, Ellen Gordon, Edward Gordon Craig: the last eight years, 1958-1966: letters
from Ellen Gordon Craig, Andoversford, Gloucestershire: Whittington Press, 1983.
Edward Gordon Craig
Craig, Edward Gordon, 1872-1966, English scene designer, producer, and actor. The
son of Ellen Terry, Gordon Craig began acting with Henry Irving's Lyceum company
(1885-97). Feeling that the realism in vogue was too limiting, he turned to scene
design and developed new theories. He strove for the poetic and suggestive in his
designs in order to capture the essential spirit of the play. His ideas gave new freedom
to scene design, although many were impractical in execution. Among his notable
productions were The Vikings and Much Ado about Nothing (both in 1903 for Ellen
Terry) and Hamlet (with the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912). At Florence, Italy, he
founded (1913) the Gordon Craig School for the Art of the Theatre; he also edited a
magazine, The Mask (1908-29). He wrote On the Art of the Theatre (1911, rev. ed.
1957), The Theatre Advancing (1921), Scene (1923), and biographies of Henry Irving
(1930) and Ellen Terry (1931).
Bibliography
See his memoirs (1957); biographies by his son Edward Craig (1968) and by C. Innes
(1983); I. Eynat-Confino, Beyond the Mask: Edward Gordon Craig, Movement, and
the Actor (1987); M. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History (2009).
Edward Gordon Craig
Edward Gordon Craig
Edward Gordon Craig (16 January 1872 – 29 July 1966), sometimes known as
Gordon Craig, was an English modernist theatre practitioner; he worked as an actor,
producer, director and scenic designer, as well as developing an influential body of
theoretical writings.

Craig's mother, Ellen Terry, ca. 1880
The illegitimate son of the architect Edward Godwin and actress Ellen Terry,[1] Craig
was born Edward Godwin on 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.
Henry Irving, 1878
Isadora Duncan
Craig spent much of his childhood, from the age of 8 in 1889 to 1897, backstage at
the Lyceum Theater where his mother was the much-beloved leading lady to actor Sir
Henry Irving. Craig later wrote an especially vivid, book-length tribute to the unique,
haunting, autocratic charisma that was Henry 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's book about Irving and Terry, A
Strange Eventful History: "Years later, 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, astonishingly, 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 Edy, 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 behavior defied their strict
moralities. Irresistible charm was her special gift, as well, perhaps, as her legacy to
her son. It is nonetheless likely, even in the protective environment of the theatre, that
Craig felt what Victorians thought of a child born out of wedlock.
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 and
Edward Carrick (1894–), art director of British motion pictures. With his lover,
dancer Isadora Duncan, Craig had a daughter, Deirdre (1906–13), who drowned at the
age of seven. Craig died in Paris in 1966 at the age of 94.
Career
Further information: The MAT production of Hamlet
Craig as Hamlet at the 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 a Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet. He also was 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 opera Dido and Aeneas, Handel's opera 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 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
had begun to develop his style. He concentrated on keeping the 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, who invited him to direct their famous
production of Hamlet with the Moscow Arts Theatre, 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 the practical theatre production.[2] He received the OBE and in
1958 was made a Companion of Honour.
Legacy
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 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.[3]
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, line and
colour. Craig believed in a theatre of the craft of the director – a theatre where action,
words, colour and rhythm combine in dynamic dramatic form.[4]
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 (Walton 1983).
As an engraver and a classical artist, Craig found inspiration in puppets and masks. In
his 1910 article "A Note on Masks", Craig expounds upon the virtue of using masks
as a mechanism for capturing the audience’s attention, imagination and ‘soul’. He also
proclaimed “…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), asking for actors to lose their prominence.
'On the Art of the Theatre' (Craig 1911), is an imaginary dialogue between a Playgoer
and a Stage Director examining the problems of the nature of stage directing. Craig
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). 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’. A director
must find the rhythm, movement, tone and colour of the text and these elements are
more fundamental than the play’s scene and staging details. The design elements can
transcend reality and function as symbols, communicating a deeper meaning, rather
than simply reflecting the real world.
See also

Leon Schiller—Craig's Polish director-colleague
References
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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, Routledge, London, 2008, first
published 1911.
Craig,E.G Isadora Duncan,Six Movement Designs, Leipsig 1906
Innes, Christopher. 1983. Edward Gordon Craig. Directors in Perspective ser.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521273838.
Holroyd, Michael. A Strange Eventful History, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2008
ISBN 0701179872
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.
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.M. Craig on Theatre, Methuen, London, 1983.
Wills, R. The Director in a Changing Theatre, Mayfield, Palo Alto, 1976.