ABSTRACT
Mr. Gordon Craig (“ Towards a New Theatre,” Dent, 21s. net) has produced a beautiful book, and in that he justifies himself. If we complain that it fails in its primary intention we are ungracious, for the gift of a beautiful book can in no case be just cause for complaint, no matter how capricious its service may be. The imaginative reader of great dramatic literature is accustomed to create ideal performances in his mind, a visionary conduct of movement and conflict that is unimpeded by the thousand embarrassing circumstances of the theatre—mechanical difficulties and mishaps, the personality of the actor, the enormous problem of investing the complicated and delicate piece of machinery which is comprehensively called the stage with the freedom and elasticity of art. And he will, too, often set this ideal performance against an ideal background without consideration of time and space—of the theatre’s walls. This background Mr. Craig does much to realise for us—on paper. These designs, with their admirable economy of detail and their stirring suggestion of height and distance cannot but leave our imagination the richer and more apt for the creation of those performances that outrun all the possibilities of theatrical device. Mr. Craig has dreamt well, and for this we are grateful. It may be said here that his new book is not greatly concerned with the opposition to words as the primary 114medium of drama that found an advocate in the author’s “ Art of the Theatre,” and there is no present necessity to dispute Mr. Craig’s denial of poetry on the stage. Many of these designs are made for accepted masterpieces of poetic drama, and whatever the designer’s quarrel with the spoken word may be in general, it is not laboured here. Nor are we disposed to pay very much attention to the text of this present volume ; Mr. Craig is not a good writer either in style or temperament. His prose is constantly apeing the ease of the conversational stylists, and always failing to catch their secret; it is rather like Mr. Newman or Mr. Montague on stilts, the fine lissomness of gait that is natural to them turning to awkward condescension, as who should walk a little way with Tom and Dick, poor fellows. There is, moreover, scarcely anything in these notes that was very much worth saying —rather an irritating wagging of the head with an “ I could an if I would.” So that dismissing the book as telling us but little of Mr. Craig’s views of the whole art of the theatre and finding annoyance rather than pleasure in his writing, we are left with the bare designs themselves, which are indeed the sole—and ample—-justification of the volume. We wish that they had been published in a folio without any trappings, but since their maker decided against this we are not disposed to quarrel unduly with what we take to be an indiscretion. These designs are full of imaginative beauty, and no one can look at them without realising that Mr. Craig is one of the most gifted men of his time. He has, as we have said, dreamt finely and cleanly; the imagination is never dissipated into mere fancy. But Mr. Craig calls his book “ Towards a New Theatre,” and it is at this point that the real trouble in his work begins.
