On the Art of the Theatre

Edward Gordon Craig, Franc Chamberlain, Franc Chamberlain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134058693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

First published in 1911, On the Art of the Theatre remains one of the seminal texts of theatre theory and practice.

Actor, director, designer and pioneering theorist, Edward Gordon Craig was one of twentieth century theatre's great modernisers. Here, he is eloquent and entertaining in expounding his views on the theatre; a crucial and prescient contribution that retains its relevance almost a century later.

This reissue contains a wealth of new features:

• a specially written Introduction and notes from editor Franc Chamberlain
• an updated bibliography
• further reading.

Controversial and original, On the Art of the Theatre stands as one of the most influential books on theatre of the twentieth century.

1
THE ARTISTS OF THE THEATRE OF
THE FUTURE

Dedicated to the young race of athletic workers in all the theatres.

Second thoughts. I dedicate this to the single courageous individuality in the world of the theatre who will some day master and remould it.

They say that second thoughts are best. They also say it is good to make the best of a bad job, and it is merely making the best of a bad job that I am forced to alter my first and more optimistic dedication to my second. Therefore the second thoughts are best. What a pity and what a pain to me that we should be obliged to admit it! No such race of athletic workers in the Theatre of today exists; degeneration, both physical and mental, is round us. How could it be otherwise? Perhaps no surer sign of it can be pointed to than that all those whose work lies in the Theatre are to be continually heard announcing that all is well and that the Theatre is to-day at its highest point of development.

But if all were well, no desire for a change would spring up instinctively and continually as it ever does in those who visit or ponder on the modern Theatre. It is because the Theatre is in this wretched state that it becomes necessary that some one shall speak as I do; and then I look around me for those to whom I can speak and for those who will listen and, listening, understand; and I see nothing but backs turned towards me, the backs of a race of unathletic workers. Still the individual, the boy or man of personal courage, faces me. Him I see, and in him I see the force which shall create the race to come. Therefore to him I speak, and I am content that he alone shall understand me. It is the man who will, as Blake says, “leave father, mother, houses and lands if they stand in the way of his art”;¹ it is the man who will give up personal ambition and the temporary success of the moment, he who will cease to desire an agreeable wealth of smooth guineas, but who shall demand as his reward nothing less than the restoration of his home, its liberty, its health, its power. It is to him I speak.

You are a young man; you have already been a few years in a theatre, or you have been born of theatrical parents; or you have been a painter for a while but have felt the longing towards movement; or you have been a manufacturer. Perhaps you quarrelled with your parents when you were eighteen, because you wished to go on the stage, and they would not let you. They perhaps asked why you wanted to go on the stage, and you could give no reasonable answer because you wanted to do that which no reasonable answer could explain; in other words, you wanted to fly. And had you said to your parents, “I want to fly,” I think that you would have probably got further than had you alarmed them with the terrible words, “I want to go on the stage.”

Millions of such men have had the same desire, this desire for movement, this desire to fly, this desire to be merged in some other creature’s being, and not knowing that it was the desire to live in the imagination, some have answered their parents, “I want to be an actor; I want to go on the stage.”

It is not that which they want; and the tragedy begins. I think when walking, disturbed with this newly awakened feeling, a young man will say, “perhaps I want to be an actor”; and it is only when in the presence of the irate parents that in his desperation he turns the “perhaps” into the definite “I want.”

This is probably your case. You want to fly; you want to exist in some other state, to be intoxicated with the air, and to create this state in others.

Try and get out of your head now that you really want “to go on the stage.” If, unfortunately, you are upon the stage, try and get out of your head then that you want to be an actor and that it is the end of all your desires. Let us say that you are already an actor; you have been so for four or five years, and already some strange doubt has crept upon you. You will not admit it to any one; your parents would apparently seem to have been right; you will not admit it to yourself, for you have nothing else but this one thing to cheer yourself with. But I’m going to give you all sorts of things to cheer yourself with, and you may with courage and complete good spirits throw what you will to the winds and yet lose nothing of that which you stood up for in the beginning. You may remain on, yet be above the stage.

I shall give you the value of my experience for what it is worth, and may be it will be of some use to you. I shall try to sift what is important for us from what is unimportant; and if while I am telling you all this you want any doubts cleared or any more exact explanations or details, you have only to ask me for them and I am ready to serve you.

To begin with, you have accepted an engagement from the manager of the Theatre. You must serve him faithfully, not because he is paying you a salary, but because you are working under him. And with this obedience to your manager comes the first and the greatest temptation which you will encounter in your whole work.

Because you must not merely obey his words but his wishes; and yet you must not lose yourself. I do not mean to say you must not lose your personality, because it is probable your personality has not come to its complete form. But you must not lose sight of that which you are in quest of, you must not lose the first feeling which possessed you when you seemed to yourself to be in movement with a sense of swinging upwards.

While serving your apprenticeship under your first manager listen to all he has to say and all he can show you about the theatre, about acting, and go further for yourself and search out that which he does not show you. Go where they are painting the scenes; go where they are twisting the electric wires for the lamps; go beneath the stage and look at the elaborate constructions; go up over the stage and ask for information about the ropes and the wheels; but while you are learning all this about the Theatre and about acting be very careful to remember that outside the world of the Theatre you will find greater inspiration than inside it: I mean in nature. The other sources of inspiration are music and architecture.

I tell you to do this because you will not have it told you by your manager. In the Theatre they study from the Theatre. They take the Theatre as their source of inspiration, and if at times some actors go to nature for assistance, it is to one part of nature only, to that which manifests itself in the human being.

This was not so with Henry Irving,² but I cannot stop here to tell you of him, for it would mean book upon book to put the thing clearly before you. But you can remember that as actor he was unfailingly right, and that he studied all nature in order to find symbols for the expression of his thoughts.

You will be probably told that this man, whom I hold up to you as a peerless actor, did such and such a thing in such and such a way; and you will doubt my counsel; but with all respect to your present manager you must be very careful how much credence you give to what he says and to what he shows, for it is upon such tradition that the Theatre has existed and has degenerated.

What Henry Irving did is one thing; what they tell you he did is another. I have had some experience of this. I played in the same Theatre as Irving in Macbeth, and later on I had the opportunity of playing Macbeth myself in a theatre in the north or the south of England. I was curious to know how much would strike a capable and reliable actor of the usual fifteen years’ experience, especially one who was an enthusiastic admirer of Henry Irving. I therefore asked him to be good enough to show me how Irving had treated this or that passage; what he had done and what impression he had created, because it had slipped my memory. The competent actor thereupon revealed to my amazed intelligence something so banal, so clumsy, and so lacking in distinction, that I began to understand how much value was in tradition; and I have had several such experiences.

I have been shown by a competent and worthy actress how Mrs. Siddons³ played Lady Macbeth. She would move to the centre of the stage and would begin to make certain movements and certain exclamations which she believed to be a reproduction of what Mrs. Siddons had done. I presume she had received these from some one who had seen Mrs. Siddons. The things which she showed me were utterly worthless in so far as they had no unity, although one action here, another action there, would have some kind of reflected value; and so I began to see the uselessness of this kind of tuition; and it being my nature to rebel against those who would force upon me something which seemed to me unintelligent, I would have nothing to do with such teaching.

I do not recommend you to do the same, although you will disregard what I say and do as I did if you have much of the volcano in you; but you will do better to listen, accept and adapt that which they tell you, remembering that this your apprenticeship as actor is but the very beginning of an exceedingly long apprenticeship as craftsman in all the crafts which go to make up the art.

When you have studied these thoroughly you will find some which are of value, and you will certainly find that the experience as actor has been necessary. The pioneer seldom finds an easy road, and as your way does not end in becoming a celebrated actor but is a much longer and an untrodden way leading to a very different end, you will have all the advantages and the disadvantages of pioneering; but keep in mind what I have told you: that your aim is not to become a celebrated actor, it is not to become the manager of a so-called successful theatre; it is not to become the producer of elaborate and much-talked-of plays; it is to become an artist of the Theatre; and as a base to all this you must, as I have said, serve your term of apprenticeship as actor faithfully and well. If at the end of five years as actor you are convinced that you know what your future will be; if, in fact, you are succeeding, you may give yourself up for lost. Short cuts lead nowhere in this world. Did you think when the longing came upon you and when you told your family that you must go upon the stage that such a great longing was to be so soon satisfied? Is satisfaction so small a thing? Is desire a thing of nothing, that a five years’ quest can make a parody of it? But of course not. Your whole life is not too long, and then only at the very end will some small atom of what you have desired come to you. And so you will be still young when you are full of years.

On the actor

As a man he ranks high, possesses generosity, and the truest sense of comradeship. I call to mind one actor whom I know and who shall stand as the type. A genial companion, and spreading a sense of companionship in the theatre; generous in giving assistance to younger and less accomplished actors, continually speaking about the work, picturesque in his manner, able to hold his own when standing at the side of the stage instead of in the centre; with a voice which commands my attention when I hear it, and, finally, with about as much knowledge of the art as a cuckoo has of anything which is at all constructive. Anything to be made according to plan or design is foreign to his nature. But his good nature tells him that others are on the stage besides himself, and that there must be a certain feeling of unity between their thoughts and his, yet this arrives by a kind of good-natured instinct and not through knowledge, and produces nothing positive. Instinct and experience have taught him a few things (I am not going to call them tricks), which he continually repeats. For instance, he has learned that the sudden drop in the voice from forte to piano has the power of accentuating and thrilling the audience as much as the crescendo from the piano into the forte. He also knows that laughter is capable of very many sounds, and not merely Ha, Ha, Ha. He knows that geniality is a rare thing on the stage and that the bubbling personality is always welcomed. But what he does not know is this, that this same bubbling personality and all this same instinctive knowledge doubles or even trebles its power when guided by scientific knowledge, that is to say, by art. If he should hear me say this now he would be lost in amazement and would consider that I was saying something which was finicking, dry, and not at all for the consideration of an artist. He is one who thinks that emotion creates emotion, and hates anything to do with calculation. It is not necessary for me to point out that all art has to do with calculation, and that the man who disregards this can only be but half an actor. Nature will not alone supply all which goes to create a work of art, and it is not the privilege of trees, mountains and brooks to create works of art, or everything which they touch would be given a definite and beautiful form. It is the particular power which belongs to man alone, and to him through his intelligence and his will. My friend probably thinks that Shakespeare wrote Othello in a passion of jealousy and that all he had to do was to write the first words which came into his mouth; but I am of the opinion, and I think others hold the same opinion, that the words had to pass through our author’s head, and that it was just through this process and through the quality of his imagination and the strength and calmness of his brain that the richness of his nature was able to be entirely and clearly expressed, and by no other process could he have arrived at this.

Therefore it follows that the actor who wishes to perform Othello, let us say, must have not only the rich nature from which to draw his wealth, but must also have the imagination to know what to bring forth, and the brain to know how to put it before us. Therefore the ideal actor will be the man who possesses both a rich nature and a powerful brain. Of his nature we need not speak. It will contain everything. Of his brain we can say that the finer the quality the less liberty will it allow itself, remembering how much depends upon its co-worker, the Emotion, and also the less liberty will it allow its fellow-worker, knowing how valuable to it is its sternest control. Finally, the intellect would bring both itself and the emotions to so fine a sense of reason that the work would never boil to the bubbling point with its restless exhibition of activity, but would create that perfect moderate heat which it would know how to keep temperate. The perfect actor would be he whose brain could conceive and could show us the perfect symbols of all which his nature contains. He would not ramp and rage up and down in Othello, rolling his eyes and clenching his hands in order to give us an impression of jealousy; he would tell his brain to inquire into the depths, to learn all that lies there, and then to remove itself to another sphere, the sphere of the imagination, and there fashion certain symbols which, without exhibiting the bare passions, would none the less tell us clearly about them.

And the perfect actor who should do this would in time find out that the symbols are to be made mainly from material which lies outside his person. But I will speak to you fully about this when I get to the end of our talk. For then I shall show you that the actor as he is to-day must ultimately disappear and be merged in something else if works of art are to be seen in our kingdom of the Theatre.⁴

Meantime do not forget that the very nearest approach that has ever been to the ideal actor, with his brain commanding his nature, has been Henry Irving. There are many books which tell you about him, and the best of all the books is his face. Procure all the pictures, photographs, drawings, you can of him, and try to read what is there. To begin with you will find a mask, and the significance of this is most important. I think you will find it difficult to say when you look on the face, that it betrays the weaknesses which may have been in the nature. Try and conceive for yourself that face in movement—movement which was ever under the powerful control of the mind. Can you not see the mouth being made to move by the brain, and that same movement which is called expression creating a thought as definite as the line of a draughtsman does on a piece of paper or as a chord does in music? Cannot you see the slow turning of those eyes and the enlargement of them? These two movements alone contained so great a lesson for the future of the art of the theatre, pointed out so clearly the right use of expression as opposed to the wrong use, that it is amazing to me that many people have not seen more clearly what the future must be. I should say that the face of Irving was the connecting link between that spasmodic and ridiculous expression of the human face as used by the theatres of the last few centuries, and the masks which will be used in place of the human face in the near future.

Try and think of all this when losing hope that you will ever bring your nature as exhibited in your face and your person under sufficient command. Know for a truth that there is something other than your face and your person which you may use and which is easier to control. Know this, but make no attempt yet awhile to close with it. Continue to be an actor, continue to learn all that has to be learned, as to how they set about controlling the face, and then you will learn finally that it is not to be entirely controlled.

I give you this hope so that when this moment arrives you will not do as the other actors have done. They have been met by this difficulty and have shirked it, have compromised, and have not dared to arrive at the conclusion which an artist must arrive at if faithful to himself. That is to say, that the mask is the only right medium of portraying the expressions of the soul as shown through the expressions of the face.

On the stage-manager

After you have been an actor you must become a stage-manager. Rather a misleading title this, for you will not be permitted to manage the stage. It is a peculiar position, and you can but benefit by the experience, though the experience will not bring either great delights to you or great results to the theatre in which you work. How well it sounds, this title, Stage-manager! it indicates “Master of the science of the stage.”

Every theatre has a stage-manager, yet I fear there are no masters of the stage science. Perhaps already you are an under stage-manager. You will therefore remember the proud joy you felt when you were sent for, and, with some solemn words informed that your manager had decided to advance you to the position of stage-manager, and begged to remind you of the importance of the post, and of the additional one or two pennies that go with the situation. I suppose that you thought that the great and last wonderful day of your dream had arrived, and you held your head a little higher for a week, and looked down on the vast land which seemed to stretch out before you.

But after then, what was it? Am I not right in saying that it meant an early attendance at the theatre to see after the carpenters, and whether the nails had been ordered, and whether the cards were fixed to the doors of the dressing-rooms? Am I not right in saying that you had to descend again to the stage and stand around waiting to see if things were done to time? Whether the scenery was brought in and hung up to time? Did not the costumière come tearfully to you saying that some one had taken a dress from its box and substituted another? Did you not request the costumière to bring the offending party before you? and did you not have to manage these two in some tactful way so as to offend neither of them, and yet so as to get at the truth of the matter? And did you ever get at the truth of the matter? And did these two go away nursing anything but a loathèd hate towards you? Put the best case, one of them liked you, and the other began to intrigue against you the next hour. Did you find yourself still on the stage at about half-past ten, and did not the actors arrive at that hour apparently in total ignorance that you had been there already four hours, and with their superb conviction that the doors of the theatre had just that moment been opened because they had arrived? And did not at least six of these actors in the next quarter of an hour come up to you and with an “I say, old chap,” or “Look here, old fellow,” start asking you to arrange something for them on the stage so as to make their task a little easier? And were not the things which they asked all so opposed one to the other, that to assist any one actor would have been to offend the other five? Having told them that you would do your best, were you not relieved by the sudden appearance of the director of the theatre, generally the chief actor? And did you not instantly go to him with the different requests which had been made to you, hoping that he, as master, would take the responsibility of arranging all these difficult matters? And did he not reply to you, “Don’t bother me with these details; please do what you think best,” and did not you then instantly know in your heart that the who...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of plates
• Introduction by Franc Chamberlain
• Acknowledgements
• Prefaces
• Introduction by Alexander Hevesi
• God save the King
• 1 The artists of the theatre of the future
• 2 The actor and the über-marionette
• 3 Some evil tendencies of the modern theatre
• 4 Plays and playwrights
• 5 The theatre in Russia, Germany and England
• 6 The art of the theatre (1st dialogue)
• 7 The art of the theatre (2nd dialogue)
• 8 On the ghosts in the tragedies of Shakespeare
• 9 Shakespeare’s plays
• 10 Realism and the actor
• 11 Open-air theatres
• 12 Symbolism
• 13 The exquisite and the precious
• Further Reading