Edward Gordon Craig, in full Edward Henry Gordon Craig, (born Jan. 16, 1872, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, Eng.—died July 29, 1966, Vence, France), English actor, theatre director-designer, producer, and theorist who influenced the event of the theatre within the twentieth century.
Craig was the second youngster of a liaison between the actress Ellen Terry and the architect Edward William Godwin. Like Edith (the opposite youngster of his dad and mom), their son was given the identify Craig, which he adopted as a surname. He started his profession as an actor, in Henry Irving’s firm on the Lyceum Theatre, London, and in a number of touring firms (1889–97), however he deserted performing earlier than endeavor his first necessary designs for productions: Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1900) and George Frideric Handel’s Acis and Galatea (1902) for the Purcell Operatic Society and Henrik Ibsen’s The Vikings (1903) for Terry’s firm on the Imperial Theatre, London. In his units, decor, and costumes for these productions, Craig asserted his revolutionary theories of theatrical design. His productions had been marked by simplicity and unity of idea, with the emphasis being positioned on the motion of actors and of sunshine. But his productions—their creative impression however—had been business failures, and the monetary help that may have permitted him to develop his concepts was not forthcoming in England.
Consequently, in 1904, Craig went into voluntary exile, accepting the invitation of Count Harry Kessler—the arbiter of style on the Weimar court docket—to go to Germany. While there he wrote his best-known essay, The Art of the Theatre (1905; republished, with articles from The Mask, as On the Art of the Theatre, 1911). He lastly arrived in Italy, the place he created the units for a manufacturing of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm for Eleonora Duse and settled in Florence. There he invented (1907) the moveable folding screens utilized in set designs for a co-production with Konstantin Stanislavsky of Hamlet on the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912. There too he made the copperplate etchings that file his researches into the creation of an artwork of motion, and he based and edited his worldwide overview, The Mask (1908–29), which helped to make his theatrical beliefs extensively recognized and during which a lot of his articles—notably “The Actor and the Übermarionette” (1907)—had been printed. In Florence he printed the etchings illustrating his scenographic ideas in A Portfolio of Etchings (1908) and likewise wrote Towards a New Theatre (1913), which accommodates 40 plates of his unique scenic designs. He established his School for the Art of the Theatre in 1903.
After World War I, which put an finish to his college’s actions, Craig turned more and more to theatrical historical past, writing Henry Irving (1930) and Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self (1931). He did participate in some excellent productions, although, directing and designing surroundings for Ibsen’s The Pretenders (Copenhagen, 1926) and for Macbeth (New York, 1928). His work as an engraver reached its peak within the illustrations for the Cranach Press Hamlet (1929), and amongst his notable postwar publications had been the essays and articles collected in Scene (1923), during which he outlined his idea of the historical past of stage design and expounded his concepts of a stage setting primarily based on the usage of moveable screens and the half performed by mild in evoking environment. In 1931 he went to dwell in France and in 1948 made his dwelling within the south of that nation, the place he wrote his memoirs, entitled Index to the Story of My Days (1957).
From the outset, Craig propounded an artwork of the theatre during which actuality, as a substitute of being reproduced by conventional representational strategies, could be transcended and interpreted by image. To him outlines, kinds, colors, and lighting had been a method of conveying environment. His most unique theatrical idea was that your entire “scene” in a dramatic work needs to be movable in all elements; each the ground and the ceiling had been to be composed of squares that, underneath the management of the artist, may very well be moved up and down independently or in teams inside a continuously altering sample of sunshine. Thus an emotional response would possibly come up within the viewers by means of the summary motion of those plastic kinds. Craig’s stage productions and, much more, his writings and his extremely stylized stage designs, woodcuts, and etchings strongly influenced the antinaturalist developments of the trendy theatre within the first half of the twentieth century, although, like his counterpart, Adolphe Appia, he designed little or no that was really staged.