ABSTRACT
The need for a school had been clear to Craig from the start. Working with amateurs in rented halls where he could design his own stages had given him the freedom to follow his ideas, but had at the same time prevented him from realizing them fully because, as he later said, of lithe limits of the money at my disposal - i.e. next to nothing - and the untrained material."! The apparent solution was to move into the professional theater. Yet he rapidly found that this imposed even more frustrating restrictions. When he wanted to transfer The Masque of Love to the Coronet Theater in 1903, its manager rejected any idea of constructing a lighting bridge immediately behind the proscenium, and refused permission to remove the footlights, to place lights on the side walls of the auditorium, or even to alter the dimensions of the stage picture by constructing a false top for the proscenium. When Craig first directed a cast of experienced actors in The Vikings, later the same year, he discovered that the expertise they had acquired in conventional productions worked against everything he was trying to achieve. With Much Ado he found that they also reverted to their old habits almost as soon as the rehearsal period was over, effectively sabotaging his conception. Not surprisingly, as soon as he came up against the inertia of established stage practices, Craig began calling for "a School for the Art of the Theatre."
