ABSTRACT
Aeschylus was that first dramatist, and it is one of the theatre's greater losses that Craig never directed a production of any of his plays. He did create a number of designs for Eleanora Duse as Electra in Hofmannsthal' s adaptation of the Sophocles play, but, as with so much of his work, this got no further than some startling effective drawings (Plate 1). The most famous has the downcast figure of Electra with arms outstretched, silhouetted in the foreground against the massive verticals of a doorway upstage. On the steps before the door huddle an indecisive group whose shrinking inaction complements and focuses Electra herself. He also made a series of bas-relief black figures, no more than a few inches high, Hecuba among them, in which he concentrated extreme emotion as is found in the outline of the masked performer. In an earlier passage from The Art of the Theatre Craig claims the dancer rather than the poet as 'father of the dramatist'. His remarkable vision of the theatre at a time when the stage was struggling into the twentieth century away from both melodrama and naturalism, found more detractors than converts at the time of writing; his evocation of 'the theatre of the ancients', as he called it, even less sympathy within formal classical scholarship.
