Edward Gordon Craig

Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), English stage designer, producer, and writer, son of the actress Ellen Terry. He entered the theatre as a child actor and from 1889 to 1897 took leading roles in the London productions of the theatrical manager and actor Sir Henry Irving. Although Craig won acclaim as an actor, he chose to become a producer. In his first production, the opera Dido and Aeneas (1900) by Henry Purcell, Craig introduced radical changes in stage management, scenery, and lighting. He used simplified, stylized stage settings and symbolic lighting effects. Moving to Italy in 1906, he founded The Mask (1908), a theatre journal that flourished for many years. He also ran an acting school in Florence. His productions, with settings of his own design, included operas, plays in which his mother starred in London, and dramas that he produced in several other European cities. Among his major productions were Rosmersholm (1906) by Henrik Ibsen for the Italian actress Eleanora Duse and Hamlet (1912) for the Moscow Art Theatre, with the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski. For the latter Craig designed a scheme of abstract shapes, incorporating tall, mobile pillar-like structures which were to be manipulated on stage in view of the audience; however these proved awkward in practice. Craig was an innovative theorist, and although many of his ideas, as in the Moscow Hamlet, could not be satisfactorily realized with the technology of his time, they have since been vastly influential. After 1904 many exhibitions of Craig's stage designs were held in England and on the Continent. His writings include The Art of the Theatre (1905), Towards a New Theatre (1913), Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self (1931), and his autobiography, Index to the Story of My Days (1957).