Abstract
Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig have been venerated together as two of the founding fathers of modern European theatre. They had much in common in their ideas on theatre, and they shared a keen interest in Japanese theatre. Having known nothing about Japanese performance, Appia had a stimulating experience of the real, but ultimately rejected it. Having gained a knowledge of virtually every aspect of Asian theatre, Craig, however, had a nightmarish experience of the real and rejected it from the outset. Consciously averse to the real, Craig could only relish in his imagination the time-honoured tradition of Asian theatre that was, for him, unknowable and dangerous to know and absorb. Appia’s and Craig’s views of Asian theatre were racially and culturally predetermined and confined. Craig, more conversant with Asian theatre than Appia was, went even further in his negative—seen from our contemporary globalized perspective—approach to Asian theatre than his German “self.”
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Notes
- 1.
Marie L. Bablet-Hahn first found, in 1979, Appia’s review folded in the personal copy of Die Musik und die Inszenierung owned by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, then traced it back to its first publication in Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, and reprinted it with a French translation in Appia’s complete works (Appia 1986b, 328).
- 2.
See chapter “‘Free Transposition’: The Use of Nō by Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing.”
- 3.
In Kerr’s original review, Sada Yacco was mentioned as “merely a transfigured monkey” (Kerr 1901, 167).
- 4.
For an English translation, see Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “On Pantomime,” The Drama (Drama League of America), vol. 14, no. 1 (October 1923), 7–8; The English Review 36 (March 1923): 261–64. The two translations are exactly the same, with no translator credited. This part of the English translation is interpretative and inaccurate. For example, “innerer Genius” was translated into “human genius” (263) instead of “inner genius.” What Hofmannsthal emphasized here is the embodied expression of the soul or what he called “the inner fullness” guided by “an inner genius,” which was exemplified in the performances by Sada Yacco, Ruth St. Denis, who was influenced by the Japanese actress, Nijinsky, and Duse.
- 5.
- 6.
In his review of a French production of Madame Butterfly, Louis Laloy wrote: “And now, if we want to have an idea of the true Japanese theatre, we should go to the Théâtre Moderne, where Madame Hanako, assisted by two excellent actors, laughs, cries, dances, swoons, and dies with a grace and a truth of which nothing in Europe can give an idea” (Laloy 1907, 86).
- 7.
The Mask, vol. 4 (1911–1912), 64.
- 8.
For Craig’s early acquaintance with Kessler, see Craig and Kessler 1995, 6–16.
- 9.
Leidsch Dagblad, March 4, 1908, 1; Haarlem’s Dagblad, March 6, 1908, 1; Nieuwsblad van Friesland: Hepkema’s courant, March 7, 1908, 9.
- 10.
During the second half of 1907, Michael Carmichael Carr, an American painter, and his Dutch wife joined Craig in Florence, Italy. Carr worked for Craig on his design projects while his wife was employed to translate from Dutch into English research material on the history of the Javanese shadow theatre (Edward Craig 1968, 232–33). A decade later, “the interesting translations made by Mrs. Carr in 1907–8” would appear in the first volume of Craig’s new magazine The Marionnette (1918) (306). From this information, it can be inferred that Craig’s English citation from Royaards’s review was translated from the original Dutch text not by Craig himself, but by someone else. I would say that the translator was probably Carr’s wife, Catharina Elisabeth Voûte. For more on Carr’s and Voûte’s collaboration with Craig, see Tian 2016.
- 11.
A., “Sada Yacco,” Haarlem’s Dagblad, March 10, 1908, 1.
- 12.
The Mask, vol. 6, no. 1 (1913), 81.
- 13.
See the chapter “‘Free Transposition’: The Use of Nō by Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing.”
- 14.
See the chapter “‘Welding the Unweldable’: Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Refraction of the Japanese Theatre.”
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Tian, M. (2018). “In Our Two Selves”: Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig on Japanese Theatre. In: The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97178-0_3
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