Edward Gordon Craig

"Towards a new theatre" by Edward Gordon Craig

"Theatre is a mountain (...) the largest mountain I have seen (...) Had it been easily accessible, it would have been climbed long ago (...) People have wandered about its base for thousands of years, no one has ever gone to the top."

Dido and Aeneas 

When Craig presented the opera with his friend and colleague Martin Shaw, he had only a plain blue background. This challenged the busy, realistic stages of the Victorian era, but this background is still used today, has almost become a staple for a production of Dido and Aeneas. Craig was not rich and was merely making use of the resources available to him, but he used them simply and efficiently, in the best way possible. 

Many of Craig's often-reproduced images have coloured perceptions of opera ever since the first staging. His approach advanced the idea of an entire production in the hands of one designer, a modern focus we now take for granted.

Dido and Aeneas was Craig's crucial first appearance as a designer. 

He interpreted the opera through vision and movement rather than through music.

Facts and theories

• He had been put onto the stage by his mother (a famous actress) at 16, and performed under Henry Irving. He soon became dissatisfied with his performances as an actor, and retired. 
• Craig began his work in the field of scenery, and W.B.Yeats stated that scene-painting 
  ‘would be a new and legitimate art appealing to a taste formed by itself and copying but itself”. 
• Craig said of his own theatricality that he took "particular care to be entirely incorrect in all matters of detail", very much the opposite of Lepage. 
• Craig despises the manner in which all theatre people rely on the dramatist. He wished to restore theatre as an independent art. Craig has been hailed as one whose designs and theories influenced and inspired the 20th century, but who "explodes everywhere except upon the English stage." They must have not been ready. 
• He said: "after practice, the theory", meaning that he would try something out and then figure out what it meant later. This was the best he could do with the resources he had, but his talent and creativity brought him success.
• He wanted to remind the audiences of recurrent theatrical values- “those single images which serve for a thousand words, the associations which transcend real life while giving to that life a greater meaning”
• He always looked to the future of theatre, saw no point in trying to reconstruct the past
• He greatly appreciated puppetry: In his opinion marionettes were the last echo of some noble and beautiful art of the past civilisation. He said that they have now become low comedians.
• He believed that masks where the “means” of expression and that without them, acting was destined to degenerate.
• "The art of the theatre is neither acting nor the play, it is not scene nor dance, but it consists of all the elements of which these things are composed: action, which is the very spirit of acting: words, which are the body of the play; line and colour, which are the very heart of the scene; rhythm, which is the very essence of dance.”
• Shakespeare never wrote stage directions because he considered them 'tasteless'
• Acting is not an art. It is therefore incorrect to speak of the actor as an artist. Art arrives only by design. Therefore in order to make any work of art it is clear we may only work in those materials with which we can calculate. Man is not one of these materials.”
• He believed that no non-borne actor should be taught to act, therefore he disagreed with Stanislavsky’s System, which said that he and his system could make a good actor out of any man.
• His early works promoted verticals, arches, cliffs, towering walls
• He developing the sliding panels and pillars to have easy flawless scene changes.
• Theory that gesture ruins dramatic poetry, as dramatic poetry is to be read not acted thus they have nothing to do with one another
• Acting in the eye more powerful and fast than any other sense
• The director must be a visionary, unique, who "knows but no longer handles the ropes"
• He defines theatre as a ‘place in which the entire beauty of life can be unfolded not only the external beauty of the world but the inner beauty and the meaning of life.’
• The aim of modern staging : to intensify the reality of things
• Against realism
• Short-tempered. When something went wrong he would have 'explosions of anger'