“I’d like to shoot the brutes who worked against me in the way Hitler shot German conspirators”: Edward Gordon Craig’s Violent War Against the British Theatre

In 1934, Edward Gordon Craig declared himself to be ‘enchanted’ by Benito Mussolini and his success in ‘freeing Italy from the vermin’. This was one of countless statements in which the British director-designer voiced his support of Fascism and called for its lessons to be applied to the theatre in order to ‘rid [it] of defective beings’. While Craig was, of course, not the only artist to align themselves with Mussolini, what is significant is how Fascism offered him a specific political frame through which to legitimise attitudes that he had held since the early 1900s, including his intense misogyny and predilection for authoritarianism. Most important for this paper is the way in which he utilised the language of Fascism to add renewed force to his ongoing assault on what he saw to be a bloated, artistically bankrupt and decaying British theatre, which, in turn, reflected an increasingly decadent country. By focusing on Craig’s attempts to establish a school of his own between 1904 and 1925, I demonstrate how he sought to create a radical alternative to the existing system that placed emphasis on loyal obedience and a strict hierarchy. Further, I argue that Craig presented his school as a prototype for rebuilding British society along disciplinarian lines, all while being himself accused of being unproductive and stagnant. As such, I argue for the importance of re-evaluating Craig’s work in relation to the current discourse on culture wars to better understand its impact on British theatre of the time.