Beyond the mask : Gordon Craig, movement, and the actor / Irène Eynat-Confino.

Eynat-Confino goes beyond the usual consideration of Craig's purported theories of the actor, scenery, and the scene painter to get at the heart of Craig's idea of theater.

She draws not only on the research of contemporary Craig scholars but on material hitherto unavailable--his writings and daybooks and the writings of friends. She ties Craig's encounter with Isadora Duncan to a decisive modification in his notion of movement. To have an instrument more controllable than the actor, he invented the uber--marionette, a giant puppet. Craig also invented the "Scene," a kinetic stage, the "screens" that brought him worldwide fame were simply an adaptation of this concept.

Eynat-Confino argues that a scenario Craig wrote in 1905, here published for the first time, reveals a theosophical system like that of Blake, a system that was the main force motivating Craig's artistic quest. In her final chapter, she carefully examines the psychological, aesthetic, and circumstantial factors that kept Craig from completing his work to bring "friendliness--humor--love--ease--peace" to the world.

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For students of the modern stage and acting theory, this study offers the most complete and perceptive assessment to date of obsessive ideas of Craig (designer/director/theorist/visionary) about the uber-marionette (a giant puppet) as a more effective instrument of control than the living actor. According to Eynat-Confino's interpretation of published and unpublished primary sources, Craig never gave up on this idea despite his retractions in 1912 and again in 1924. This study also explores Craig's related concerns, innovations of the ``kinetic stage'' (and the reductive ``screens'' for the regular theater), the use of masks, and movement and its relation to space. There are numerous revelatory close readings of some of the knottier passages in the Craig canon, although the elucidations of Craig's quasi-metaphysics, his mystical experiences or ``illuminations,'' and some of his aesthetic theory (often seemingly contradictory), are frequently almost as confusing as the original passages and ideas. Thoroughly researched and documented, with key illustrations (though oddly no photos of various extant puppets/uber-marionettes), this book will be an important addition for serious upper-division or graduate theater collections.-D.B. Wilmeth, Brown University

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