For the trade
THEATRE HILARY SPURLING
Edward Gordon Craig was born in 1872 and died last year. Ellen Terry was his mother, E. W. Godwin who built Northampton town hall was his father, Henry Irving was his master and Sir John Gielgud, who last week opened the Vic- toria and Albert's exhibition of his work, is his first cousin once removed. Craig himself was the one great designer this country has produced, at any rate since Inigo Jones. But scenery bored him, he said, he aimed at revolution, though 'few people in Battersea or Mayfair recognise this as a fact.'
Unlikely that the denizens of Battersea and Mayfair will emerge much the wiser from the present exhibition. Mr George Nash has amassed quantities of snapshots, woodcuts, curiosities and above all stage designs. But Craig was an untrained and often ineffectual draughts- man and, in an exhibition which by its nature must ignore his use of colour, light and move- ment, it is difficult to do him justice. Nor does Mr Nash attempt to place his work in relation to other theatrical developments, past, present or to come : hard, for instance, to imagine the impact on a public used to lavish and meticu- lously realistic Lyceum stagings of Craig's Dido and Aeneas in 1900—Dido crouched miserably on her golden throne at the foot of a vast purple skycloth, broken only by a narrow strip of green trellis running across the back of the stage. There are monochrome sketches of Craig's Arcadia for Ads and Galatea two years later—a tent of fluttering white ribbons against a lemon coloured sky—and of his set for Housman's Bethlehem: dark, huddled sheep and a few shepherds enclosed in a severe frame- work of hurdles and dwarfed again by a loom- ing night sky (black velvet, spangled with stars cut from a dismantled chandelier). In the past three years in London there have been, at most, three or four sets which might begin to com- pete with the austerity, delicacy and brilliant inventiveness of these designs made more than half a century ago.
But, though they dazzled - Yeats, Arthur Symons and the few others who turned up, none of these early productions ran for much more than half a dozen performances. In 1904 Craig left England for good, abandoning our theatre to what he called the Trade—or that 'gang of toughs'—to devote himself to higher things else- where. He fell in with Isadora Duncan—'Leave my house, you vile seducer!' cried her mother —and through her met Eleanora Duse for whom he made his spacious, gleaming temple to replace Ibsen's 'old-fashioned living room' in Rosmersholtn. Plans to work with Max Rein- hardt, Diaghilev, and in England for Herbert Beerbohm Tree, all came to nothing, ending, as with Duse, in more or less violent recrimina- tions. Through Isadora again, Craig went to Moscow to direct the famous 1912 Hamlet for Stanislavsky, using his revolutionary system of screens: one hour before the premiere, as Stanislavsky sat alone in the darkened theatre, the screens collapsed amid rending and tearing. Next Craig made the great wooden model for Bach's St Matthew Passion which was destroyed, along with his newly-opened school, in the First World War.
This model would, on my reckoning, have produced a stage set some hundred feet high :
qt, 'it would cost too much, howled the usual howlers. Not to do it cost a good deal more,' said Craig. How much our vigorous and whole- sale rejection of Craig's work has cost the Eng- lish theatre is hard to say; particularly just now, when his influence has for years been steadily seeping back in likely and unlikely quarters. For, if one thing emerges clearly from this ex- hibition, it is that Craig anticipated practically every theatrical development of the last sixty years : not simply technical advances—though here Josef Svoboda's celebrated set for the Brussels Hamlet, using hydraulic machinery, looks like a second-hand and somewhat clumsy version of Craig's model called 'The Scene'— and the great imaginative leaps forward into the twentieth century. Also in quite small de- tails. Look, for instance, at the series of designs (a couple of masks for Dido, a sketch for Yeats's blind beggar, the querulous puppet heads for the Three Men of Gotham) which, with their gull's ' eyes and jutting lower lips, might have been made for any of Beckett's derelicts. A sketch, dated 1904, for Hamlet as an English gentle- man—round-shouldered, hands in pockets, scarf limply trailing—contains the germ of David Warner's performance for Peter Hall two years ago: 'Without trouser pockets Hamlet is no longer possible on the stage,' noted Craig, 'modern dress was not what I had aimed at here but a dress made of some of the elements of modern man—bags—a cardigan—a muffler....'
Craig played Hamlet once in Irving's clothes, and later came to see himself as crown prince struggling against corruption, treachery, ill- usage and 'those dead customs that want to crush the theatre.' And Hamlet seems alwaystat to have brought out his best : an early sketch, showing Polonius spitted behind the arras, sug- gests at once his control over space and volume —the swagged, bulky folds of the curtain dominating the stage—and his essential delicacy --a wisp of light falling on faded sprigs of pink, green and blue flowers in one murky swathe. There are, of course, other brilliant de- signs—a pair of exquisitely traced, leafy screens carved in Florence in 1912; a woodcut showing two figures crouching at the far, light end of a tunnel, for the storm scene in Lear; best of all perhaps, a sketch for the forum scene in Julius Caesar—the conspirators huddled on a bare forestage, backed by a vast semicircular flight of steps and straining to catch Antony's voice which comes shrilly, floating on the wind, fromlar above them where he addresses a half invisible, murmuring crowd: Antony has his back In the audience and is dwarfed in turn, as so often in Craig's designs, by a grey sky filling three quarters of the stage.
But the core of the exhibition is made up of the two models and nine photographs of the Moscow Arts Hamlet: those famous tall doots and heavy pillars rearing out of sight to make a chaste and simple cloister, or melting into a maze of jutting steps. crannies, closets, dark gulfs of space and black or half-lit passages winding into the vast hinterlands of the palace. Here Hamlet paced a corridor or narrow cage. his black image reflected from the golden sur- face of the walls; here the ghost grew softly from grey castle ramparts, here the king plunged among the gaudy players, and ran across the swathe of light on the forestage with Hamlet leaping like a tiger in pursuit. For these. and for the glimpse they give of the authority fluency and piercing radiance of Craig's imagi nation, the exhibition will be long remembered And let us hope that even now the Trade is pressing forward to make up for lost time.
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