ABSTRACT
IN THE REMARKABLE EXPERIMENTS of Mr Gordon Craig, I seem to see the suggestion of a new art of the stage, an art no longer realistic, but conventional, no longer imitative, but symbolical. In Mr Craig’s staging there is the incalculable element; the element that comes of itself, and cannot be coaxed into coming. But in what is incalculable there may be equal parts of inspiration and of accident. How much, in Mr Craig’s staging, is inspiration, how much is accident? That is, after all, the important question. Mr Craig, it is certain, has a genius for line, for novel e»ects of line. His line is entirely his own; he works in squares and straight lines, hardly ever in curves. He drapes the stage into a square with cloths; he divides these cloths by vertical lines, carrying the eye straight up to an immense height, fixing it into a rigid attention. He sets squares of pattern and structure on the stage; he forms his groups into irregular squares, and sets them moving in straight lines, which double on themselves like the two arms of a compass; he puts square patterns on the dresses, and drapes the arms with ribbons that hang to the ground, and make almost a square of the body when the arms are held out at right angles. He prefers gestures that have no curves in them; the arms held straight up, or straight forward, or straight out sideways. He likes the act of kneeling, in which the body is bent into a sharp angle; he likes a sudden spring to the feet, with the arms held straight up. He links his groups by an arrangement of poles and ribbons, something in the manner of a maypole; each figure is held to the centre by a tightly stretched line like the spoke of a wheel. Even when, as in this case, the pattern forms into a circle, the circle is segmented by straight lines. This severe treatment of line gives breadth and dignity to what might otherwise be merely fantastic. Mr Craig is happiest when he can play at children’s games with his figures, as in almost the whole of The Masque of Love.1 When he is entirely his own master, not dependent on any kind of reality, he invents really like a child, and his fairy-tale comes right, because it is not tied by any grown-up logic. Then his living design is like an arabesque within strict limits, held in from wandering and losing itself by those square lines which rim it implacably round. Then, again, his e»ects are produced simply. Most of the costumes in The Masque of Love were made of sacking, stitched roughly together. Under the cunning handling of the light, they gave you any illusion you pleased, and the beggars of the masque were not more appropriately clothed than the kings and queens. All had dignity, all reposed the eye. The aim of modern staging is to intensify the reality of things, to give you the illusion of an actual room, or meadow, or mountain. We have arrived at a great skill in giving this crude illusion of reality. Our stage painters can imitate anything, but what they cannot give us is the emotion which the playwright, if he is an artist, wishes to indicate by means of his scene. It is the very closeness of the imitation which makes our minds unable to accept it. The eye rebounds, so to
speak, from this canvas as real as wood, this wood as real as water, this water which is actual water. Mr Craig aims at taking us beyond reality; he replaces the pattern of the thing itself by the pattern which that thing evokes in his mind, the symbol of the thing. As, in conventional art, the artist unpicks the structure of the rose to build up a mental image of the rose, in some formal pattern which his brain makes over again, like a new creation from the beginning, a new organism, so, in this new convention of the stage, a plain cloth, modulated by light, can stand for space or for limit, may be the tight walls of a tent or the sky and the clouds. The eye loses itself among these severe, precise, and yet mysterious lines and surfaces; the mind is easily at home in them; it accepts them as readily as it accepts the convention by which, in a poetical play, men speak in verse rather than in prose. Success, of course, in this form of art lies in the perfecting of its emotional expressiveness. Even yet Mr Craig has not done much more, perhaps, than indicate what may be done with the material which he finds in his hands. For instance, the obvious criticism upon his mounting of Acis and Galatea2 is, that he has mounted a pastoral, and put nothing pastoral into his mounting. And this criticism is partly just. Yet there are parts, especially the end of Act I, where he has perfectly achieved the rendering of pastoral feeling according to his own convention. The tent is there with its square walls, not a glimpse of meadow or sky comes into the severe design, and yet, as the nymphs in their straight dresses and straight ribbons lie back laughing on the ground, and the children, with their little modern brown straw hats, toss paper roses among them, and the coloured balloons (which you may buy in the street for a penny) are tossed into the air, carrying the eye upward, as if it saw the wind chasing the clouds, you feel the actual sensation of a pastoral scene, of country joy, of the spring and the open air, as no trickle of real water in a trough, no sheaves of real corn among painted trees, no imitation of a flushed sky on canvas, could trick you into feeling it. The imagination has been caught; a suggestion has been given which strikes straight to the ‘nerves of delight’; and be sure those nerves, that imagination, will do the rest, better, more e»ectually, than the deliberate assent of the eyes to an imitation of natural appearances. Take again some of those drawings of stage scenery which we have not yet been able to see realized, the decoration for Hofmannsthal’s Elektra and Venice Preserved, and for Hamlet and for The Masque of London. Everywhere a wild and exquisite scenic imagination builds up shadowy structures which seem to have arisen by some strange hazard, and to the sound of an unfamiliar music, and which are often literally like music in the cadences of their design. All have dignity, remoteness, vastness; a sense of mystery, an actual emotion in their lines and faint colours. There is poetry in this bare prose framework of stage properties, a quality of grace which is almost evasive, and seems to point out new possibilities of drama, as it provides new, scarcely hoped for, possibilities to the dramatist. Take, for instance, The Masque of London. It is Piranesi, and it is London of today, seen in lineal vision, and it is a design, not merely on paper, but built up definitely between the wings of the stage. It is a vast sca»olding, rising out of ruins, and ascending to toppling heights; all its crazy shapes seem to lean over in the air, and at intervals a little weary being climbs with obscure patience. In one of the Hamlet drawings we see the room in the castle at Elsinore into which Ophelia is to come with her bewildered singing; and the room waits, tall, vague, exquisitely still and strange, a ghostly room, prepared for beauty and madness. There is another room, with
tall doors and windows and abrupt pools of light on the floor; and another, with its significant shadows, its two enigmatic figures, in which a drama of Maeterlinck might find its own atmosphere awaiting it. And in yet another all is gesture; walls, half-opened doors, half-seen windows, the huddled people at a doorway, and a tall figure of a woman raised up in the foreground, who seems to motion to them vehemently. Colour cooperates with line in e»ects of rich and yet delicate vagueness; there are always the long, straight lines, the sense of height and space, the bare surfaces, the subtle, significant shadows, out of which Mr Craig has long since learned to evoke stage pictures more beautiful and more suggestive than any that have been seen on the stage in our time. The whole stage art of Mr Craig is a protest against realism, and it is to realism that we owe whatever is most conspicuously bad in the mounting of plays at the present day. Wagner did some of the harm; for he refused to realize some of the necessary limitations of stage illusion, and persisted in believing that the stage artist could compete successfully with nature in the production of landscape, light, and shadow. Yet Wagner himself protested against the heaps of unrealizing detail under which Shakespeare was buried, in his own time, on the German stage, as he is buried on the English stage in our own. No scene-painter, no scene-shifter, no limelight man, will ever delude us by his moon or meadow or moving clouds or water. His business is to aid the poet’s illusion, that illusion of beauty which is the chief excuse for stage plays at all, when once we have passed beyond the ‘rose-pink and dirty drab’, in Meredith’s su¹cing phrase, of stage romance and stage reality. The distinction, the incomparable merit, of Mr Craig is that he conceives his setting as the poet conceives his drama. The verse in most Shakespearean revivals rebounds from a backcloth of metallic solidity; the scenery shuts in the players, not upon Shakespeare’s dream, but upon as nearly as possible ‘real’ historical bric-à-brac. What Mr Craig does, or would do if he were allowed to do it, is to open all sorts of ‘magic casements’, and to thrust back all kinds of real and probable limits, and to give at last a little scope for the imagination of the playwright who is also a poet. I do not yet know of what Mr Craig is capable, how far he can carry his happy natural gifts towards mastery. But he has done so much already that I want to see him doing more; I want to see him accepting all the di¹culties of his new art frankly, and grappling with them. For the staging of Maeterlinck, especially for such a play as La Mort de Tintagiles [Maeterlinck’s The Death of Tintagiles, 1894], his art, just as it is, would su¹ce. Here are plays which exist anywhere in space, which evade reality, which do all they can to become disembodied in the very moment in which they become visible. They have atmosphere without locality, and that is what Mr Craig can give us so easily. But I would like to see him stage an opera of Wagner, Tristan, or the Meistersinger even. Wagner has perfected at Bayreuth his own conception of what scenery should be; he has done better than any one else what most other stage-craftsmen have been trying to do. He allows more than they do to convention, but even his convention aims at convincing the eye; the dragon of the Ring is as real a beast as Wagner could invent in his competition with nature’s invention of the snake and the crocodile. But there are those who prefer Wagner’s music in the concert-room to Wagner’s music even at Bayreuth. Unless the whole aim and theory of Wagner was wrong, this preference is wrong. I should like, at least as an experiment, to see what Mr Craig would make of one of the operas. I am not sure that he would not reconcile those who prefer Wagner in the concert-room to this new kind of performance on the stage. He would give us the mind’s
attractive symbols of all these crude German pictures; he would strike away the footlights from before these vast German singers, and bring a ghostly light to creep down about their hoods and untightened drapings; he would bring, I think, the atmosphere of the music for the first time upon the stage. Then I would like to see Mr Craig go further still; I would like to see him deal with a purely modern play, a play which takes place indoors, in the house of middle-class people. He should mount the typical modern play, Ibsen’s Ghosts. Think of that room ‘in Mrs Alving’s countryhouse, beside one of the large fjords in Western Norway’. Do you remember the stage directions? In the first act the glimpse, through the glass windows of the conservatory, of ‘a gloomy fjord landscape, veiled by steady rain’; in the second ‘the mist still lies heavy over the landscape’; in the third the lamp burning on the table, the darkness outside, the ‘faint glow from the conflagration’. And always ‘the room as before’. What might not Mr Craig do with that room! What, precisely, I do not know; but I am sure that his method is capable of an extension which will take in that room, and, if it can take in that room, it can take in all of modern life which is of importance to the playwright.
