ABSTRACT
Gordon Craig (1872-1966), English actor, designer, director and modern theatre pioneer, also offers in this article an alternative ‘rearrangement’ whereby theatre could become consistently ‘organic’ or natural-with idiomatic speech colloquially delivered, natural movements, the setting a facsimile of nature, perhaps with real objects, etc. But his preference for the more provocative option of the ‘inorganic’ is clear, and this is in line with the most notorious of all his proposals, that actors be replaced by marionettes. But Craig, initially an actor himself, backed off from this proposal afterwards - as befitted the son of a renowned actress (Ellen Terry), and an admirer of Henry Irving, his first employer. From 1897 he worked as designer and director, for Beerbohm Tree, Otto Brahm (of the Berlin Freie Buhne), Max Reinhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Stanislavski. At the same time he furthered his fertile ideas on theatre through his magazine The Mask (190829), and his numerous articles and books. His volume The Art of the Theatre (1905) and the extended On the Art of Theatre (1911) where the marionette is extolled, were landmarks, rapidly translated into all the major European languages.
