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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
If the ordinary student of theatre remembers anything at all about the production of Hamlet conceived by Gordon Craig in 1909 and staged by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912, it is that the screens fell down. This aspect of the design, a series of folding screens on casters, arranged in such a way that they might be reversed and alternated, thus changing the scene before the eyes of an audience to create a sense of abstract monumentality, was in fact poorly realized by the plain wood-and-canvas flats that proved to be the most viable medium. And they did indeed fall down, although not in performance, but at a special technical run-through on the afternoon before the opening, when they required rapid repairs and trays of ballast to stabilize them. As a result, the quick-change in full view was replaced by a traditional scene-shift behind closed curtains. Craig had not been at that calamitous rehearsal and knew nothing of the accident; when he read about it, twelve years later, vividly recounted in Stanislavsky's My Life in Art, he reckoned the story a lie and a libel, and, fearful of the mockery to which his ingenuity would be subjected, threatened to sue unless Stanislavsky cut the offending episode. Not until confronted by a sworn affidavit from the stage hands and master carpenters who had been present did he subside into a grumbling quiescence.
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