Symbolist theatre of the 1890s projected dream-like, spiritual worlds in which stage realism and the personality of the actor gave way to ritual movement and a unity of aesthetic effect across all elements of the production. It initiated a revolution in theatre practice, which spread across Europe from the Théâtre de l’Œuvre in Paris to the Moscow Art Theatre.2 The playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was particularly important to the development of the movement in Britain, where he influenced playwrights from W.B. Yeats to Harley Granville-Barker.3 His Pelléas and Mélisande (1892) was key, made famous in Britain by the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in the role of Mélisande. When Maxwell Armfield saw the play in Birmingham in 1900, he experienced it as a religious revelation, what he called “the raising of the veils” onto spiritual reality.4 Afterwards, he “dreamed all night long of strange pale-faced ladies with never-ending black tresses and voices like morning water, and of flaxen haired youths and love and beautiful sorrows.”5 The flyer for that Birmingham production, exhibited here, was found among the papers of his wife, Constance Smedley Armfield.

Maeterlinck’s work was popularised in Britain through a staging of his play The Bluebird at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1909–1910.7 The cast included a young Margaret Morris as the soul of Water, in which role she was instructed to dart “streaming, disheveled and tearful” across the stage and provoke a fight with Fire.8 Stage instructions indicated that the characters of Water and Light should both be dressed in “Neo-Grecian or Anglo-Grecian (a la Walter Crane)”.9 Morris brought something of her own to the performance by incorporating the Greek dance positions that she learned from Raymond Duncan and his student Annea Spong at around this time, when she attended some of his classes in London.10 “He explained that these positions, with their accentuated opposition of arms and legs, must have been the basis of the athletic training and the dance of the ancient Greeks,” she later related. “In a way they have become the equivalent, in the M.M. technique, of the daily barre practice.”11

Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird imagines two children chasing the bluebird of happiness through a magical, symbolic landscape before discovering that it was waiting for them at home all along. The play was first staged at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1907 and quickly became an international success, touring to London (1909), New York (1910), Paris (1911), and Berlin (1912). The first film adaptation was made in England in 1910; the second was made in New York in 1918 by the prominent French director Maurice Tourneur. Tourneur’s film was rich in visual references: “six reels of what might be described as living etchings in color”, as the critic for the Chicago Daily Tribune observed.12 It was billed as an antidote to war in Europe, “a mighty cheer from the great Belgian author to this war-torn nation”.13

Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) was a leading exponent of symbolist theatre and a crucial influence on the little theatre movement, famous for his theory that the actor should function as an Übermarionette, a super-puppet, controlled by the director and working in harmony with all the other elements of the production to deliver a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. He began his career in London but moved to Germany in 1904, settling in Italy from 1906, where he established his own school of theatrical design.14 His work was generally considered to be impracticable and was rarely produced. Nonetheless, he attracted a cult following amongst young British artists, who followed his work through exhibitions of his drawings and models, and in publications such as The Mask (1908–1929), the theatre journal, which he largely wrote himself.15 He was, in the words of Paul Nash, “the one really imaginative English artist of his generation […] romantic, daring, scandalous and brilliant”, and enjoying “the dual distinction of cher maître and a voice crying in the wilderness.”16 This photographic portrait by E.O. Hoppé conveys something of his charisma and of the stylised quality of his “Art of the Theatre” (the title of his seminal essay of 1905).

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) was a pioneer of modern dance in the West, who set out to restore art to its ancient condition as “the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body’s movement”.17 She rejected classical ballet, drawing her technique from ancient Greek vase painting, the observation of natural forces such as the sea, folk and social dancing, and modern athletics.18 Other artists, including Michel Fokine at the Ballets Russes and Edward Gordon Craig, were crucially influenced by her work.19 Craig believed that she had rediscovered a universal language of movement which could communicate profound emotional truths and rejuvenate the theatre.20 The print shown here is one of six studies that he made of the dancer in motion.21 It conveys the flowing, improvised quality of her movement, as well as his own characteristic attention to stage lighting and shadow.

The photographer E.O. Hoppé (1878–1972) was the leading photographic portraitist of his day, whose work has recently been reinstated after decades of accidental neglect.22 This exhibition contributes to the reassessment of his work by highlighting his role in London’s cultural networks during the First World War, as a portraitist, as co-founder of the Plough Club, and as art editor of Colour magazine from its launch in 1914. Studies from the Russian Ballet was his first major publication. It comprises fifteen portraits of dancers from the Ballets Russes posing in character in different performances from the company’s repertoire. The two photographs of Nijinsky were provided by Auguste Bert as Nijinsky had not yet posed for Hoppé.23

Ellen Terry (1847–1928) was one of the most celebrated actresses of her day and the mother of Edward Gordon Craig and Edith Craig, both of whom were key to the cultural networks explored in this exhibition. Her book The Russian Ballet is inflected by a commitment to internationalism in the arts, which also shaped the politics of the wartime little theatres. The Ballets Russes was an “international possession”, she insisted, the impact of which was particularly strong in Britain, but which was “neither the property of a nation nor the result of patriotism”.24 Her illustrator, Pamela Colman Smith, also worked for Edy Craig’s theatre company, the Pioneer Players.25 As Terry herself pointed out in her Introduction, Smith’s pictures for The Russian Ballet relate only tangentially to the text, and they agreed to share equal rights to the book.26 The approach, then, is similar to that taken by Armfield in his indirect “pictorial commentary” on The Ballet of the Nations.

Geoffrey Whitworth (1883–1951), the editor at Chatto & Windus who commissioned The Ballet of the Nations, published this study of Vaslav Nijinsky when the dancer was at the height of his fame. It was in 1913 that Nijinksy performed The Rite of Spring in Paris, and it was also the year that he fell out with Diaghilev and left the Ballets Russes. Whitworth was intent on establishing a National Theatre in Britain, a project which became his life’s work, after it was initially scuppered by the outbreak of war in 1914.27 He explained that he wrote The Art of Nijinsky, with the dancer’s cooperation, in order to “preserve an impression” of an ephemeral art form, and he was one of the few critics to give an appreciative account of The Rite of Spring.28 Little is known about the illustrator, Dorothy Mullock (1888–1973), except that she worked also with the writer Clifford Bax, illustrating his set of Studio Plays (published 1918–1923).29 Bax was an active member of the Plough Club, which was part of the network of theatre groups in London during the war.

Around 1914, the Vorticist artist David Bomberg made a series of abstracted drawings of modern dance, some based on the Ballets Russes, which was then performing in London, and some based on a Margaret Morris summer school in Bournemouth.30 One of the drawings was reproduced as the cover design for John Rodker’s Poems (1914). Others he converted into lithographs in 1919 and incorporated into a book with a short poem of his own evoking the experience of watching the Ballets Russes:

Methodic discord startles…
Insistent snatchings drag fancy from space,
Fluttering white hands beat—compel. Reason concedes.
Impressions crowding collide with movement round us—
—the curtain falls—the created illusion escapes.
The mind clamped fast captures only a fragment, for new illusion.

David Bomberg31