Edward Gordon Craig as Teacher-Dictator

Abstract

Edward Gordon Craig was a controversial and iconoclastic figure in the early twentieth-century British theatre. Underpinning his work as a director, designer, and essayist was a desire to secure obedience and loyalty from the people with whom he worked and to ensure that he was the unquestioned authority. Nowhere was this ambition clearer than in his School for the Art of the Theatre, which he ran in Florence from 1913 to 1914. This article draws on extensive archival research, providing a detailed examination of the School’s structure, organization, and curriculum and demonstrating the importance that Craig placed on discipline, which became the School’s governing principle. It contextualizes the School’s practice, discussing Craig’s work in and outside the theatre and his political views so as to consider why he prized discipline above all else. In particular, the article reveals, for the first time, his intense misogyny and celebration of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and shows how this informed his school scheme and was informed by it.