A few months after his first meeting with Adolphe Appia in 1914, Edward Gordon Craig wrote, in a letter to William Rothenstein, English painter and art historian, of their “ancient union”: “I was quite unbeknown by him and he unbeknown to me and we were moving straightly on the same point with all or nearly all the same thoughts, feelings, and sights in our two selves” (Quoted in Beacham 1994, 161. Emphasis in original). In the same letter, Craig hoped that whenever men speak of the theatre, “remember to mention Appia’s name … and link us together” (183). Two of the founding fathers of modern European theatre, Appia and Craig had much in common in their ideas on theatre, and they shared a keen interest in Japanese theatre.

In late January 1902, Appia saw the visiting Japanese troupe led by Kawakami Otojirō and Sada Yacco perform at the Residenztheater de Munich. On January 31, 1902, in a letter to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, British-born German philosopher and writer, Appia wrote: “You will undoubtedly see the Japanese. If my little article about them comes out (trans. C. Z. [trans. Countess Zichy]), I will send it to you” (Appia 1986a, 328). The “little article” Appia mentioned, “Noch ein Wort über das japanische Schauspiel,” was his review of the Japanese guest performance, which was first published in Münchner neueste Nachrichten on February 5, 1902 (Appia 1986b). On February 9, 1902, Chamberlain acknowledged receipt of Appia’s review: “Your article I liked, but it was too short, hence too many generalities, not enough facts, for my taste” (Appia 1986a, 328). Appia’s review was also dismissed by Arthur Seidl (1863–1928), German writer and dramaturge, as a piece in which “there is obviously far too little to be taken into account” (Sdl. 1902, 259). More than eight decades later, Marie L. Bablet-Hahn, editor of Appia’s Œuvres complètes, notes that Appia clearly knew nothing about the subject and that his critique of the Japanese performance is “purely instinctive and subjective” (Appia 1986a, 329).Footnote 1 Perhaps because of its relative brevity and its lack of details and facts on the subject, Appia’s review has gone virtually unnoticed over a century, even after it was reprinted in 1986 in his complete works. In contrast, Craig’s interest in Japanese theatre and Asian theatre in general has received far more critical attention. In this chapter, I will look at Appia’s review closely in the context of his theory and in the context of the German reception of the Japanese performance and compare his view of Japanese theatre with that of Craig. When dealing with the history of intercultural theatre that involved the founding fathers of modern European theatre, Appia’s view should be studied as part of that history and cannot be dismissed as “purely instinctive and subjective.” By the same token, it is interesting, illuminating, as well as necessary for me to link and look at Appia’s and Craig’s views of Japanese theatre together as a whole in the intersections of their ideas that lay the foundations for modern Western theatre.

Exteriority Versus Interiority: Appia’s View of the Japanese Performance

Like many German critics, Appia saw primarily the exterior aspect of the Japanese performance—what was presented to the eye, and, failing to grasp its interior primacy, perceived its alleged lack of interiority as a fatal drawback. Appia thus wrote of Sada Yacco’s performance in The Geisha and the Knight:

The Japanese we have now seen possess what one could definitely call the performance of the exterior, virtually only for the eye. The easiest process, such as an impassioned woman who pursued her rival to strike her, is here meticulously dissected and fixed with the surest taste in an artificial time sequence, from which then results that stylization, which has so delighted our eyes. It creates a kind of painted plasticity in movement—that is, in time—of the greatest artistic quality. (Appia 1986b, 331. Emphases in original)

According to Appia, “inevitably” as a result of “this exceptional, one-sidedly increased ability,” there was “the lack of interiority (Innerlichkeit)” (331) in the Japanese performance, and consequently, the Japanese suffered from “a hypertrophy of the expression of purely external processes” (332. Emphases in original).

Appia’s perception of the exterior in Sada Yacco’s stylization, her “painted plasticity in movement” or “the greatest artistic quality”—in a word, virtuosity—was not simply a subjective reaction to the Japanese performance due to his ignorance of the latter’s interior process and character; it was, first and foremost, in accord with his theoretical arguments against virtuosity in music and art. In 1906, Appia deplored the situation of music teaching in his time: “Consequently, we view music as a virtuosity, a combination of elements independent of our personal, physical and moral life; in short, a phenomenon that is entirely intellectual in spite of all its specific appeal to the senses. The teaching of music remains, therefore, external” (Appia 1993, 77). In 1908, Appia contended that music had gone off to develop its own virtuosity and thus alienated itself ever more from “the innate rhythm of the human being, its creator” and that painting for the mise-en-scène had become “a virtuosity that pays little attention to the actor’s presence” (Appia 1989, 177–78). In 1922, insisting that the artist’s object is to express “the life of his soul,” Appia argued that “all the virtuosity of the artist,” who fails in his object and creates an artifice with an end in itself, is but “a frivolous and criminal game he plays with us as well as with himself” (325). Appia’s view also predisposed his perception of the virtuosity of Jacques Copeau’s experiments at the Vieux-Colombier, especially the latter’s experiment on Nō. Having attended all the performances, including the rehearsal of a Nō play, Kantan, Appia said to Copeau: “Virtuosity is a poison” (Copeau 1991, 213–14).Footnote 2 Given his consistent view on virtuosity, Appia’s remark provides a clear characterization of Copeau’s experiments as something exterior, artificial, devoid of interiority, and ultimately, of life.

Appia was not alone in his view of the exteriority of Japanese performance. His view must be placed in the tradition of German Innerlichkeit and seen as characteristic of the German mind (or, as Appia called it, the German race), which prioritizes interiority or inner soul. As Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber have noted, the “great dichotomy” [interiority/exteriority] had “its most significant impact in German thought and letters, an impact whose traces can be found in Pietism, Romanticism, and German Idealism and all the way to the formation of the Geisteswissenschaften [sciences of mind] in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is still virulent today in expressions such as Deutsche Innerlichkeit” (Campe and Weber 2014, 8). It is not surprising that Appia’s view of the exteriority of Japanese performance was shared by some of the leading German critics of his time.

Karl Scheffler, German art critic and historian, looked at the performance of Sada Yacco and the Japanese troupe in the context of the European—especially, the German—reception of Japanese art. Scheffler compared Japanese art (and culture) with ancient Greek art and with the German Gothic. While Japanese art has, in exterior form, “all features of the grotesque” in common with the Gothic, Scheffler argued, “it lacks entirely the spiritual elevation, the moral-aesthetic apotheosis of Christian art” (Scheffler 1902, 328). In his view, the development of Greek art was guided by ancient religious (dithyrambic) experience, and thereby, “the primitive” in Greek art “perfects itself internally, that is, psychologically-architecturally”; in contrast, the lack of religious experience led to an “external” development of Japanese art, namely, “the naturalistic-decorative refinement of primitivity” (329). For Scheffler, spiritual art requires “the musical keynote in the soul,” and that is precisely what is lacking in Japanese art:

The Greeks were thus swinging up from the barbaric beginnings to the first master builders of humanity, and the Gothic people thus created a sublime polyphony of the arts; but the Japanese were unable to go across the highest point out of a lower level, because their art was a product of the eyes, not the soul … They became necessarily painters but remained only painters, because they had been denied the architectural-musical sense. (329)

Proceeding from his overall perspective on Japanese art, Scheffler, like Appia, considered Japanese theatre exterior and short of interior depth. Scheffler’s view was clearly reflected in his comparison of Sada Yacco with Eleonora Duse. Scheffler considered the Italian actress superior to the Japanese because of the emotional depth of the former in contrast to the exterior and conventional shallowness of the latter: “The actress of the Mikado is apparently already Europeanized; but one can still see exactly enough the nature of this foreign art of appearances” (331). Thereby, like Appia, who characterized it as “a kind of painted plasticity in movement,” Scheffler argued that the beautiful and relief-like pictures that changed and moved in the Japanese performance were “calculated more for the eye than for the soul” (331) and that the art of Japanese performance “shows only the obvious action, only the visible, the results of inner processes, not these processes themselves” (332–33).

Likewise, Alfred Kerr, an influential German-Jewish theatre critic, considered the art of Japanese acting shorn of emotional and spiritual depth. According to Kerr, the art of Japanese acting was characterized by a flower-like delicacy and loveliness, a monotonous grace, a pictorially exquisite pleasure, and a fatal butchery; it was “a children’s art” without “the intermediate stages of our spiritualized civilization” and without “our soul” (Kerr 1917, 349–50). Thus, for Kerr, “these mimes show more skills than emotional depth. More physical than spiritual,” as exemplified by Sada Yacco’s acting in her death scene characterized by Kerr as “the naturalism of these plant-eating human beings” (351).Footnote 3 Kerr’s view of Japanese art was controversial and polarizing even in his day. Hans Rosenhagen, German art historian and critic, insisted that Kerr should “apologize” for “his condemnation of the Japanese art of acting from the Western standpoint,” by “condemning the lack of culture in European stage design” (Rosenhagen 1901, 172–73).

In contrast to Appia and those German critics discussed earlier, who considered Japanese performance exterior and unbalanced with interiority, some other German critics underlined the interiority of the Japanese performance. For example, Arthur Seidl questioned Appia’s view, arguing that “our aesthetic knowledge” had much to ingest from the impressions of Japanese performance as it upset “all our basic aesthetic concepts” (Sdl. 1902, 257). For Seidl, “the image” of the Japanese actors that seemed to be the adequate element of representation for everything that rose to “the crudest naturalism” was balanced by “their corresponding expression for the beautiful and the sublime” that “readily presents a gradation of gesture full of emotion in pure stylization” (258). Seidl concluded that “the quintessence” of what the Japanese performance stimulated in the Germans appeared not as “unbalanced” as it was portrayed by Appia, who, as noted previously, argued that the Japanese suffered from “a hypertrophy of the expression of purely external processes” (259. Emphasis in original). Hans Rosenhagen stressed the inner content of the Japanese performance. For him, colour in the Japanese performance was not just used to please the eye; it was really used symbolically to signify “the transformations of the most varied emotions” (Rosenhagen 1901, 174). In this respect, Rosenhagen considered particularly significant Sada Yacco’s dance before the Buddhist monks. “As soon as the director is thinking to make ensemble scenes coloristically advantageous,” Rosenhagen argued, “there is much to learn from the Japanese” (174). As for Japanese art, Rosenhagen stressed the artistic and cultural superiority of Japanese theatre over the crude exteriority of European theatre, which “offers mostly raw or barbaric images to the eye” (174).

Having seen the Japanese performance, Georg Fuchs observed: “the Japanese stage achieves dramatic accents of an intensity—of which we have no idea—purely by stylistic means” (Fuchs 1905, 73). Fuchs’s admiration for the visualization of the Japanese performance is precisely what Appia accounted for in the German appreciation of it: “We do not know the beautiful violence, and we do not even have the slightest idea of what it means to have the gift of externalizing unconscious feelings in an artistically stylized form” (Appia 1986b, 331. Emphasis in original). However, unlike Appia, who underlined the exteriority in the Japanese performance and its alleged lack of interiority, Fuchs stressed its rhythmical visualization of the inner movement, which exemplifies his own idea: “Their stage has never stepped out of the true dramatic style, has never forgotten that drama is rhythmic movement of the body in space” (Fuchs 1905, 77).

As noted previously, Appia opined that the stylization of the Japanese performance “creates a kind of painted plasticity in movement.” For Appia, however, such an external stylization only delights the eyes. By “rhythmic colourism,” Fuchs underlined in the visual presentation the inner or emotional movement, “the psychological course of the play with the color composition of the costumes and the design of the scene” (Fuchs 1905, 78). For Fuchs, the neutral setting that appeared to Appia external and only attractive to the eye was rhythmically harmonized with other essential elements of the performance, such as gestures, characters, groupings, and costumes, in “the dynamic spectrum of the whole, extremely important, essential to the completion of the whole” (78–79). It is important to note that in his Die Revolution des Theaters, published in 1909, Fuchs made a significant revision of his review, emphasizing that “the neutrality of the setting was strictly held by the Japanese theatre of the good time” and that “the setting was designed, in certain indefinable way, in tune with the psychological content of the scene” (Fuchs 1909, 118. Emphases added).

Like Fuchs’s observation, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s view was in sharp contrast to Appia’s. According to Hofmannsthal, it was out of “the inner super-fullness (innerer Überfülle) itself” that Sada Yacco, like Ruth St. Denis, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Duse, delivered a sustained presentation of ceremonial gestures and movements that appears sublime in a purified sense, although the language and the action of the play were unintelligible to the Europeans (Hofmannsthal 2011, 14).Footnote 4 In contrast to Appia’s hierarchy that privileges music over the body that serves to exteriorize the interiority of music, in Hofmannsthal’s hierarchy, first importance is accorded to pantomimic movements and gestures, and the human body in motion precedes words and music. For Hofmannsthal, the body is not only capable of revealing the soul or inner fullness, but is capable of doing so more immediately and succinctly than words and music (15).

As indicated previously, when Appia wrote of the Japanese performance, he clearly had Wagner’s music drama in mind. It was in light of the German music drama that Appia spoke of the Japanese one-sidedly developed ability to excel in exteriority at the expense of interiority. It is interesting to note that in his review of the Japanese performance, Henry Fouquier, a French dramatic critic, compared it with Wagner’s music drama. Looking at the Japanese drama as “a libretto of pantomime,” Fouquier saw in the mimed performances by the Japanese actors an exquisite expression of interiority or “an art of exquisite naturalism.” According to Fouquier, “it is through mime that they mostly translate and express passions, and not only the simple passions, but also the nuances of feeling”; thereby, “just as in Wagner’s music where the voice sometimes only serves to describe, in a simple melody, a dramatic situation while the orchestra expresses all the nuances of feeling it generates, the mime is the essential part of the performance of the Japanese artists” (Fouquier 1900, 10).

All these German and European critics and writers saw the exteriority/interiority of Japanese theatre through the guest performances by Sada Yacco and her troupe. In contrast, it is worth noting the view offered by Bernhard Kellermann, a German writer who visited Japan and had a first-hand experience of Japanese theatre and dance. “Everyone knows that people in Japan play a theatre different from ours,” Kellermann wrote in 1912. “The European stage is more reality, truth, depth, soul, art, the Japanese is more appearance, exteriority, imagery, illusion; the European shows more human beings, the Japanese more a human ghost” (Kellermann 1912, 43). But, for Kellermann, the Japanese stage was “only seemingly more exteriority”; in actuality, those magnificent figures the Japanese actor portrayed with great mastery were “Monuments of hatred, lust, despair, the whole sky and the whole hell of human feelings—rigid, majestic, and unearthly, which a European actor never reached” (45).

A Harmonious Fusion of the Exterior and the Interior: Appia’s Vision for German Theatre

The performance of the Japanese actors reminded Appia of what was lacking in German and European theatre: forms and means of embodiment. Appia sensed the need for a harmonious fusion and balance of the interior and the exterior. In his short review, Appia noted, compared with the Japanese and as abundantly evidenced on all German stages, the Germans lacked the gift of externalizing feelings in an artistic and stylized form:

The artistic enthusiasm that gripped us during an event such as the recent Japanese performance cannot in any circumstance satisfy us. It was so easy to be fired up with enthusiasm! Let us look for a moment around us. We move ungracefully, dress up ugly, speak in a crude manner. We do not know the beautiful violence, and we do not even have the slightest idea of what it means to have the gift of externalizing unconscious feelings in an artistically stylized form. Is it therefore any wonder that the view of all that we lack fills us with pure pleasure? We are not entitled, however, to rest satisfied with this pleasure to the eye, which is still associated with the mighty magic of the exotic. Rather, we should remember vividly what we Germans have learned to understand by the concept of “drama”—and how slowly learned and with what sacrifices! (Appia 1986b, 331. Emphases in original)

For Appia, although the German do not possess this gift of externalization, they had another gift—the gift of the musical expression of the interior:

That we do not have this gift, all our stages carry an abundance of testimony. But we possess another: Ours is the marvelous gift to directly express to the ear the subtlest movements of the soul by an equally meticulously accurate, artificially mathematical dissection and composition (score) in time—that is to say, in movement. I mean the German music drama. What we can express directly through music, the Japanese is capable of that—and I mention this again and again, because she served us by her presence in Munich as a stimulus—through her moveable painted plasticity. (332. Emphases in original)

Appia thereby saw both the strength and the weakness inherent in Japanese and German theatre and the need for a harmonious and balanced fusion of the two tendencies—the representation of the interior and that of the exterior—in the development of German dramatic art:

From this exceptional, one-sidedly increased ability of the Japanese, results inevitably an obvious lack: it is the lack of interiority. If we possess, on the other hand, an increased ability to express the interior, then this happens at the expense of the aesthetic sensibility for the exterior representation. So taken from a pure aesthetic point of view, we do not stand superior to the Japanese. The simplification that the Japanese use unconsciously to offer the eye something equally perfect with as much force, we use it in an exactly opposite way to direct us to the ear with the same intensity. The current grotesque overload of scenery hopefully cannot mislead us. Obviously we are suffering from a hypertrophy of the expression of inner processes and the Japanese, on the other hand, from a hypertrophy of the expression of purely external processes. It follows from this that a harmonious fusion of both tendencies would be pursued to the highest degree. I firmly believe that it will take place in some way. The connection from one part of the world to the other, which is easier for us more and more, and the increased interest inspired in us by people who are apparently farthest from us will help to prepare for this important development of our dramatic art. The ever more obvious horror of our plastic artists for all what we call our art of mise en scène is in itself a rejoicing symptom. (332. Emphases in original)

But Appia’s harmonious fusion is predisposed to and ultimately centred on the German interiority. In 1918, in his “Preface to an English Edition” of his Music and the Art of the Theatre, Appia considered it an “advance” that “Wagner’s work has transformed the Idea of drama itself by virtue of the fact that it locates the center of gravity in the internal action, to which music and only music holds the key, but of which, nevertheless, the actor must remain the corporeal embodiment on the stage” (Appia 1962, 2. Emphases in original). According to Appia, however, Wagner could not resolve the “cruel” and “tragic” conflict in which he struggled: “the conflict between music for which there was no suitable expression in the living body of the performer, music which could not achieve such externalization without the risk of having its own identity suppressed—and the necessity, nevertheless, of presenting the music and the human body simultaneously” (3. Emphases in original). Appia found in Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurythmics a synthesis of the internalization of music and the externalization of the human body (4). With the synthesis of Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurythmics, Appia continued, “No longer will the poet be a separate and conflicting entity with regard to the music … The poet will become the prime focus; he alone will consecrate the divine union of music with the human body” (4).

Ultimately, Appia was never able to go beyond the poet-dramatist-centred Western tradition in contrast to the actor-centred Asian tradition. As a result, Appia was never able to go beyond his treatment of the human body—or what he called “this musical discipline of the body”—merely as means of externalization (of the interiority of music) in which the music is no longer separated from the body nor subjugated to it, whereas the body is subjugated to the desire of the music for externalization in an attempt to resolve “the Wagnerian compromise” between the music and the actor. In fact, as early as 1899, in his original edition of Music and the Art of the Theatre, Appia had thus defined the role of the actor in the creation of what he called “the word-tone drama”:

In surrendering himself to the poet-musician, the actor not only sacrifices the creation of his own role, but also that natural emotion contained by the role, which divorced from the music, would be evoked by him. The poet-musician communicates emotion to the actor by means of the extraordinary forms imposed on him: it is only by means of plastic forms developed separately from passionate expression that the dance can attain its all-powerful force as it joins with symphonic music to create the word-tone drama. (Appia 1993, 41. Emphases in original)

Appia’s scheme of “the word-tone drama” dictates that the actor’s dance and pantomime must forego expressing inner life in order to give the human body “a purely musical-expressive activity” while the music detaches itself from the human body in order to express inner life fully and freely (Appia 1993, 42). It is clear that Appia’s perception of the Japanese performance as exterior and devoid of interiority was firmly conditioned by his one-sided view of the harmonious fusion that privileges the interiority of the music over the exteriority of the body.

Appia’s Return Home

Although the Japanese made Appia conscious of the need for a harmonious and balanced fusion of the exterior and the interior, Appia ultimately rejected the elements or means of Japanese theatre and chose to return to the sacred and rich source of German theatre and to find in it the means to meet such a need:

It is absolutely not a question of an internationalization of the art. What we already possess is an invaluable, sacred property. But for that very reason, we must strive to provide its development with those indispensable elements that are necessary for attaining a harmonious balance, instead of continuing to cultivate our unfortunate hypertrophy, as it is unfortunately the case. The Japanese will not need to provide us with these necessary factors. These foreign performances should only serve to awaken in us this strong need for harmony and balance. We will then feel already rich enough to find within ourselves the means to satisfy this artistic need. (Appia 1986b, 332)

Appia’s view of the exteriority of the Japanese performance and of the need to return to the sacred tradition of German theatre was nothing new. As early as 1899, Appia had articulated extensively in his La Musique et la mise en scène a similar view in his comparison of the German race and the Latin race. For Appia, the “invaluable, sacred property” of German theatre was Wagner. Appia cited Wagner in his argument that “It is the essence of the German mind that it builds from within” (Appia 1986a, 154). In contrast, the specific character of Latin (French) culture was virtuosity; the production of a work of art in this culture was predicated on the degree of virtuosity in the artist (163). In Appia’s view, at “the very heart of the issue” was the underlying question of race (155). For Appia, virtuosity or exteriority was characteristic of the Latin race and culture just as interiority (the expression of the inner soul, inner life, or inner essence) was integral to the German race and culture. Although technical virtuosity was lacking in German interiority, Appia nevertheless tried to assert the “rectitude” and superiority of German drama (more precisely, the Wagnerian music drama) over the virtuosity of Latin art. “Wagnerian drama comes from his own blood,” Appia argued. “A representation of this drama that remains in German only to demonstrate the rectitude of his character: if the technical virtuosity of the form is lacking, he nevertheless can taste, in his own way, the powerful influence” (155). The “divine beauty” of German drama and the genius of Wagner only need the devoted service of Latin virtuosity, whereas the Latin artist takes from the German genius what his race may entail—German interiority, “by putting his virtuosity in the service of a foreign and superior element” (155). Ultimately, for Appia, while the Latin artist with its virtuosity was in need of the powerful influence and balance of German drama with its interiority, the Germans must find within themselves the inner resources, not relying on external virtuosity, in order to be able to perpetuate the work of art of which Wagner had revealed to the Germans the “existence” in the German race (156. Emphasis in original). According to Appia, the musician who aims “only to artificially reproduce the passionate vibration characteristic of the works of the master” will find himself in a dead end “because his virtuosity, as such, is not the expression of the desires of his race.” Thus, for Appia, “It is only in him that the musician can put in place the development of the Wagnerian methods” (157).

In a lecture delivered in 1925, Appia argued that dramatic art in its entirety depends upon the spectator; as dramatic enjoyment is a question of reaction by the spectator, the reaction to the same performance by the spectator of one race is different from that of another race. Thereby, in his view, “The interest that a European shows for a performance from the Far East has nothing in common with that experienced by the natives” (Appia 1991, 474). Because of such a racially rooted and determined difference, Appia argued against the imposition on the Germans “a dramatic and scenic art in complete disaccord with our atavisms and our own genius” (474). As he did more than two decades earlier in his review of the Japanese performance, Appia rejected the internationalization of art, arguing that “Internationalism in the theatre is the death of dramatic art” because “it cannot deal with the work of art” and because “it dries up its source” (474). Appia thus concluded his argument:

In summary: the mise en scène, by itself, is nothing. It is the spectator who creates it and who, in that way, inspires and determines dramatic production. Consequently, to deal with mise en scène on stage is for us to examine ourselves in this regard and to seek to clear up in our hearts the origin of our taste for dramatic art and the form that is appropriate to give to this art if we want to make it accord with our deep atavisms and with the genius of our race. (474. Emphasis in original)

Appia’s position was much similar to Scheffler’s. According to Scheffler, his comparisons of Japanese performance with German Gothic art shows that “the Indo-Germanic peoples have the higher culture strength”; consequently, he believed that the Germans could appropriate “nothing unique” from Japanese art (Scheffler 1902, 334). Like Appia, the experience of Japanese performance only convinced Scheffler of the present necessity of going back to the roots of the German spirit and of emphasizing “one’s own strong character” (334).

However, in sharp contrast to Appia and Scheffler, Julius Hart, German writer and literary and theatre critic, saw the future of theatre align with the actor who, no longer being the servant of the poet, dominates the stage with his peculiar art, as demonstrated by the Japanese theatre represented by Kawakami and Sada Yacco. This Japanese art “could cause a revolution for us, as once the Meininger have changed the image of our stage,” Hart argued. “We can learn infinitely a great deal from it, and a bit of japonism would certainly benefit our theatre art as much as it has benefited our painting. Here are, in any case, great models that need to be studied and that require the highest absorption” (Hart 1901, 180–81).

“We Go on along Our Own Way”: Gordon Craig’s View on Japanese Theatre

Appia’s racially grounded and oriented approach to dramatic art is remarkably similar to that of Craig. Like Appia, Craig believed that Japanese theatre and other Asian forms could help the Europeans rediscover the forgotten laws and sacred wealth of European theatre; like Appia, Craig was opposed to imposing Eastern forms on Western theatre. In his ultimate rejection of Japanese theatre, Craig joined Appia: Appia asserted the racial necessity of the Germans to return to the sacred tradition of German theatre; Craig insisted that the path for Western theatre to move forward must be English and American, not Asian.

Craig’s interest in Japanese theatre is much more extensive and better known than Appia’s.Footnote 5 It is also well known that Craig’s negative view of Sada Yacco’s and Hanako’s performances primarily stemmed from his prejudice against the presence of actresses on stage, which was tied to his position against naturalism and commercialism in theatre. Craig, who saw Hanako perform in Florence, Italy, disliked Hanako’s “melodramatic realism,” arguing that she was not an artist and that she and her type of performer did not in any faintest way reflect the art of the theatre of the East, which Craig considered contrary to realism (Craig 1913–1914a, 238–40).Footnote 6

There is no clear evidence that Craig ever saw Sada Yacco perform in London when the Japanese actress and her troupe visited there twice in 1900 and 1901. In 1908, in his response to Dutch actor Willem Royaards’s (1867–1929) report on Kawakami’s performance in Amsterdam, Craig mentioned, without identifying Sada Yacco or Kawakami, the Japanese actors’ visit to London “some years ago” (J. S. 1908, 25). In 1911, arguing against vulgarities in the theatre, Craig wrote in a short comment: “We also know that perfect dancing is possible without a display of naked or semi-naked limbs. Sada Yacco was perhaps the most perfect dancer of her day, and she avoided all such display” (J. Van Holt 1911, 44). These are the only two notes by Craig that I find may indicate that Craig probably saw Sada Yacco perform in London. As evidence, however, they are far from being conclusive as he may have gathered such information from other sources.

Whether Craig saw Sada Yacco perform may not have made any critical difference in his predisposed judgement of her performance. After all, he was interested in the Japanese actress not as an artist representing ancient Japanese theatre that could provide inspiration to modern European theatre, but as an Eastern antithesis to demonstrate his view that “only the masculine mind was fitted for stage performances” (Tao 1910, 96; Craig 1919, 232) and as a woman whose performance on the Japanese stage, in his view, was destined to ruin the venerable tradition of Japanese theatre (Tao 1910, 97; Craig 1919, 233). In his short review of W. von Seidlitz’s A History of Japanese Colour Prints, Craig drew attention especially to those plates that show actors in female parts, arguing that “each of these figures is worth any amount of argument upon the desirability, the absolute necessity to the art of the theatre, of replacing women by men upon the stage.”Footnote 7

In contrast to Craig, and with the exception of William Archer who dismissed the Japanese performance as too “mechanical,” “crude, primitive, and monotonous” (Archer 1901a, 32, 1901b, 28), Craig’s English contemporaries appreciated Sada Yacco as a great artist (Symons 1903, 76–77). Osman Edwards argued that the presence of Sada Yacco—“a tragic actress of real power” (Edwards 1901, 70)—“who braved the public opinion of her countrywomen by being the first of her sex to act in company with masculine comrades,” would be “an acquisition to any stage” (67). For J. T. Grein, who compared Sada Yacco with Duse, the Japanese actress made her performance intelligible to a foreign audience by her intense facial expressions, gestures, and movements, which was, to Grein, “the concluding evidence of her power” (Grein 1900, 252). Likewise, for G. S. Street, Sada Yacco’s acting that relied “almost entirely on eloquent gesture” was strange, but was “acting of the finest quality” (Street 1900, 141).

It is more interesting and illuminating to note the experience of Sada Yacco’s performance by Harry Graf Kessler, a noted Anglo-German writer and patron of modern art. As a friend and patron of many years, Kessler sympathized deeply with Craig in his new ideas of theatre reform. Three years before he met Craig in 1903,Footnote 8 Kessler saw Sada Yacco perform in Paris and wrote of his experience of her performance in the death scene that gave him “such a strong momentary sensation” that “even the most realistic death throe of a European actor, the Zacconi or the Duse” could match (Kessler 2004, 301). For Kessler, the Japanese actress’s performance of the death throe in rhythm and harmony of colours ties the movement of emotion to the eye like a “terribly beautiful dance picture”; the composition of the picture looks perfectly true, like a real death, but excites no sentimental sympathy even in sentimentally cultivated Europeans (307). Two years later, after seeing Eleonora Duse perform, Kessler compared her performance with Sada Yacco’s: Duse performed “through purely lyrical means and inner mood,” and thereby, in contrast, Sada Yacco was “superior to Duse” because the Japanese actress had “the gestures for her emotions” and drew “the plastic beauty” into her art whereas “Duse volatilizes her mood, even before she enters the domain of the plastic” and “remains predisposed in the sentimental” (486–87). Kessler’s opposition to sentimentality in theatre is akin to Craig’s abhorrence of psychological realism. But unlike Craig, Kessler spoke highly of the physical and plastic means the Japanese actress utilized to externalize her emotions, and unlike Appia, Kessler did not look at Sada Yacco’s art of plasticity as necessarily symptomatic of the lack of interiority.

In 1905, speaking of Craig’s idea on the art of theatre, Kessler noted that Craig’s idea on the total art of theatre stressed the primacy of movement and gesture over the word. According to Kessler, such a dream of the total work of art that Wagner envisioned from music and poetry and that Craig imagined to be realized anew from painting, dance, and gesture was revealed to Europeans by “the dances of Loie Füller—not to mention the sudden appearance, out of an alien world, one might say, the unfolding manifestation, of the Japanese [actress] Sada Yacco” (Kessler 1988, 92–93, 95). In a letter to Craig, dated April 17, 1910, Kessler asked Craig to do the staging design for Max Reinhardt’s production of Oedipus Rex, encouraging him “to combine the Greek ‘Orchestra’ with the Japanese ‘Blumenweg’ or ‘Way of flowers [hanamichi]’” (Craig and Kessler 1995, 67. Emphasis in original). Given the fact that Reinhardt had already planned the use of the hanamichi in his production of Sumurun to be opened on April 24, 1910, Kessler’s suggestion would have been an intriguing one for Craig. But the proposed collaboration between Craig and Reinhardt never became a reality. Had Craig undertaken the design of the production, he would have certainly rejected Kessler’s suggestion because of his aversion to theatrical chinoiserie or japonisme.

Given his prejudice against the presence of actresses as a reform of the Japanese stage, it is not surprising that Craig admired the traditional and conservative character of Japanese performance and dance, especially the aristocratic Nō. He considered Japanese dance superior to European dance because of “its strict ritual, its noble conservatism,” and “its obedience to a fine tradition” (Craig 1910–1911a, 91). Having never seen a Nō performance, Craig dreamed of “its beautiful monotony, its freedom from violent passion or play of emotion, its simplicity, symbolism and spiritual suggestion, a highly conventionalised form of art, a relic of that which was finest in ancient Japan, the language, costumes and postures being still those of eight hundred years ago” (91). In contrast, Craig argued, “Europeans have lost the wisdom which belonged to the spectators and the artists of the No (sic)” (Craig 1926, 163). It was only in Henry Irving’s “nearly perfectly designed” performance that Craig found something akin to “what the great actors of Japan did—designed their parts” (Craig 1930, 76). Characteristically, Craig had a high regard for Japanese puppet theatre. For him, the achievement of the Japanese puppet-masters is “certainly worthy of the greatest admiration” because of their ability “to completely efface themselves” and “to obliterate all traces of personality” (Craig 1913–1914c, 217).

Despite his interest in Asian theatrical traditions, Craig, like Appia, was uncompromisingly opposed to imitating Asian theatre and insisted on the primacy of the Western tradition. In 1908, during their short stay in Amsterdam, Sada Yacco and Kawakami performed for three nights at the Hollandschen Schouwburg from March 2 through March 4. Willem Royaards, the noted Dutch actor, saw Sada Yacco and Kawakami perform on the opening night in Miaulements de Chats and Le Démon et le Sabre japonais (or Le Diable et l’Epée du Japon), two plays the Japanese had recently performed in Paris. Royaards’s review of the Japanese performance was published overnight in Algemeen Handelsblad and De Telegraaf (Royaards 1908a, b) and two days later in Het nieuws van den dag: kleine courant (Roijaards 1908). A celebrated actor of his time, Royaards was apparently highly respected for his review of the Japanese performance, as a major part of it was also published in some other Dutch newspapers.Footnote 9

In his review, Royaards admired Sada Yacco and Kawakami as “great artists” (Royaards 1908a, 1). The Dutch actor was deeply touched by their performances in the one-act tragedy Le Démon et le Sabre japonais, based on the Kabuki play Moniji-gari (Hunting for Autumnal Leaves). For him, what the Japanese performers gave him to enjoy in the tragedy about “expressive acting” was “extraordinary,” and therefore, he felt it necessary to express “openly” his “admiration” for the two artists. Furthermore, he recommended the Japanese performance to Dutch actors in order for them to truly feel something about the “art of acting in the pure sense of the word” (1). Regarding Royaards as “one of our finest stage artists,” an artist well rounded and respected in his craft, B. I. Stouri agreed with Royaards that Sada Yacco and Kawakami brought the art of acting, pantomime, and plastic art close to supreme perfection. Like Royaards, he urged actors and actresses of Western countries to see the great performance by the prodigious Japanese artists, in which they could learn more than in all the dramatic schools of the continent (Stouri 1908, 6).

In February and March 1908, while Sada Yacco and her troupe were travelling and performing in Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, Craig was in Florence, preoccupied with the preparation for the first issues of his journal, The Mask (Craig, Edward 1968, 241, 244). Gathering material for the column, “Foreign Notes,” Craig apparently read an English translation of Royaards’s review of the Japanese performance and referred to it as a “report” from Amsterdam delivered by “J. v. H.” (Jan van Holt) (J. v. H. 1908, 21),Footnote 10 one of the many pseudonyms used by Craig (Craig, Edward 1968, 242). Without providing his original source, Craig cited Royaards’s review of Sada Yacco’s and Kawakami’s performances in Le Démon et le Sabre japonais nearly in its entirety:

Believe me, it does not matter that you do not understand the language of these artists. In this [performance of the] old Japanese Legend perhaps only forty words [fifty words] are spoken, and of these not even ten by Kawakami, who plays the Prince Koremotchi, and yet what an artist of the Theatre he proves himself to be [in this]! In seeing [Seeing him in] his very powerful and always beautiful gestures, which remind us of a series of peerless Japanese prints [a series of prints of the best draughtsmen from the “old” Japan], I suddenly understood the Japanese and a great part of the culture [cultural life] of this unconquerable race [this, recently proved unconquerable people], but also came to a fuller understanding of something else; that is to say, the aims of Mr. Gordon Craig to subordinate word to gesture in the Dramatic Art [the aims of Gordon Craig in the dramatic art to see the word again made subordinate to the gesture]. The impression I received from the silent acting of the Japanese will be ineffacable (sic) in me [The impression I have received tonight from this actor who speaks almost no word will be ineffaceable in me]…. [And with what words I will praise the art of Ms. Sada Yacco? In her portrayal of Princess “Abruma” was a wealth of acting, above all, a variety of alternately graceful, majestic and most intense gestures, which have become truly too rare in the European theatres not to brag about them—where one finds them—with the greatest joy.] Apart from the pleasure which the Japanese give us, they give us as well a deeper [clearer] insight into the kernel of the art of acting than most of our European stars, [who lately came to us, did so]. (J. v. H. 1908, 21; Royaards 1908a, 1)

It is worth noting that in his citation, Craig left out the part (placed in my bracket) of the review in which Royaards praised Sada Yacco’s performance in Le Démon et le Sabre japonais. Craig was attracted to Royaards’s review not because of what another Dutch critic called Royaards’s “excessively high praise” of the art of the Japanese actress and her troupeFootnote 11; he was interested in Royaards’s acknowledgement of his fuller understanding of Craig’s aims to subordinate the word to gesture, or, as Craig suggested in his editorial notes, of the “truth” that Craig revealed about the art of acting and that Royaards believed was confirmed by the Japanese performance. “The visit to Amsterdam of the Far Eastern actors is particularly remarkable for one thing,” Craig noted. “It has caused an actor of the West to proclain (sic) his belief that words are not necessary to the full understanding of a dramatic performance. When the Japanese visited London some years ago was there one actor who found enough courage and modesty to proclaim the same truth?” (J. S. 1908, 25).

In spite of his sympathy with Royaards’s assertion of the “truth” of his idea on the art of acting, Craig rejected Royaards’s advice to Dutch actors to learn from the Japanese actors:

Although we must treat all his statements with consideration, we do not feel ourselves quite in sympathy with his advice to the Dutch actors to go and see the Japanese actors. We would rather caution all actors of the West to beware of ever witnessing a performance by Eastern actors. We see the disaster which has come to our wall papers and other crafts by a too warm admiration of Japanese art. To search for and discover the laws which govern all art and to attempt to abide by these laws, this is the duty of the artist; but we must beware of any sudden influence which would lead to imitation, especially so strange an influence as that able to be brought to bear by the East upon the West. For it is not necessary to learn from Japan. The laws of art are universal; they are the only universal laws. (J. S. 1908, 25)

Craig’s response was typical of his overall position against the Occidental imitation and appropriation of Asian ideas, forms, and techniques and of his awareness of what he perceived as the increasing danger that the knowledge of the East could present to the identity of Western tradition. Craig did not believe that Asian theatre—even the aristocratic Nō in which Craig had a predisposed interest—has any practical value for Western theatre. In his review of Marie C. Stopes’s book on Nō plays (Stopes and Sakurai 1913), Craig argued:

We have nothing to gain, as some would claim, by a mere imitation of this or any other ancient form of drama, of its masks, its symbolism, its conventions, its costumes: it is rather in tracing the spirit of which these outward forms and accessories were the expression that we may find something of value, either as warning or encouragement, to aid us in shaping the masks, the symbols, and the laws of our own Theatre which is to be. (Craig 1913–1914b, 265)

Later in an article, “A Plea for Two Theatres,” Craig asserted that it is unnecessary and even dangerous for the West to learn from the East:

I think it is unnecessary to mention the East when speaking of the possible development of Western art; not that I am wanting in respect for what the East possesses and can produce; but there is a danger in becoming too early acquainted with a matured foreign development of an art which should be evolved afresh from one’s own soil. (Craig 1918a, 22)

Thus, for Craig, the very knowledge of the East became increasingly a danger to the identity of Western theatre. In a short note on Introduction to the Study of Indian Music by E. Clements, Craig argued, it is “fact” that the East and the West remained wide apart, and everything else is “fancy.” “The dangers of knowing are ever increasing. The danger of knowing all about the East … what a danger! The more we know the more we lose.”Footnote 12 A few years later, Craig made his position even more definite:

Whenever you see an Indian work of art, tighten the strings of your helmet. Admire it … venerate it … but for your own sake don’t absorb it … Our great actors and actresses … our playwrights … all have prepared the way. But the path is English and is American, and it’s not on the road to Mandalay that we are moving … or are expected to move. Europe and America look to us, remember, to remain ourselves. I want my followers then to love all things of the East … They over there are wonderful, and we can know it, admit it, admire it, and goodnight. We love them and all their works, and just because we do so sincerely we go on along our own way. (Craig 1918b, 32)

In 1923, in his review of Arthur Waley’s The Nō Plays of Japan (1921), Craig asserted that it was impossible for a foreigner to understand Nō: “To understand it entirely one has to be born a Japanese and be still living in Japan—in that Japan which we suppose is still the Japan of the Nō-Drama” (Craig 1923, 34). Moreover, according to Craig, although Nō is “the soul of Japan,” it has no practical value for Western theatre: “As a mere hint as to how we should produce plays, it is futile. As a decorative thing, it is worthless to us. Merely because it employs masks, it is, for us, nothing. Symbolical, I believe. What of that, for us? It deals with heroes and great legends—where lies the content, for us?” (34).

Given his abhorrence of the Western imitation of Eastern theatre, Craig, like Appia, might not appreciate Copeau’s experimental work on Nō.Footnote 13 He might not approve of Meyerhold’s praise of the two Japanese actresses, Hanako and Sada Yacco, and might be opposed to the Russian director’s assimilation of Japanese techniques,Footnote 14 as he spoke in 1925 disparagingly of the Russians’ “slick talent” of imitation:

Imitating to perfection is certainly a talent and it is this special talent which is possessed by the Russians. They derive it from the Far East. And in the Russian theatre this talent has been so cleverly employed that it has thoroughly dazzled Europeans and Americans … Russia’s far-famed Ballet is the fruit of this slick talent, and the other forms of Dramatic art are thought out and executed by men who possess immense powers of mimicry. (Jan Klaassen 1925, 40)

Conclusion

Both Appia and Craig saw primarily the exterior aspects of Japanese theatre, which were, for them, free from an intense play of interior emotion. Appia’s perception of the alleged lack of interiority in Japanese performance ultimately was in accord with his stress on the importance of the interior that was, for him, inherent in the atavisms and genius of the German race; Craig’s perception of the exteriority in Japanese performance was in conformity with his idea of acting in the mould of Über-marionette. Craig once noted that one thing that pleased him was the Japanese “disdain of psychological expression by means of face or voice” (Craig 1910–1911b, 143). According to Charles Lyons, “Craig’s concept of the actor as symbol manifested itself in two assertions: the denial of the psychological method of acting of the Western theatre and the affirmation of the symbolical nature of Eastern drama” (Lyons 1964, 265). I want to add that Craig’s affirmation of the symbolical nature of Eastern drama represents, at the same time, a denial of the psychological method of Eastern acting. The movement of the Eastern actor is not just symbolic or a pure symbolical representation of the idea of the dramatic poet; it is also psychological or a physical embodiment of the psychology of the character the actor portrays. Furthermore, the psychological method of Eastern acting is not just confined to the actor’s movement; it also incorporates the actor’s voice and face. As noted previously, Appia was never able to transcend the poet-dramatist-centred Western tradition in contrast to the actor-centred Asian tradition. As a result, Appia was never able to go beyond his treatment of the human body as merely exterior and subservient to the poet-musician. Likewise, for Craig, it was the Marionette, inhuman and egoless, who gave “the promise of a new art” through “his two virtues of obedience and silence” (Craig 1912, 97), and the Marionette was thereby the “only one actor … who has the soul of the Dramatic poet and who has ever served as true and loyal interpreter of the Poet” (95).

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 (Hanako and, probably, Sada Yacco) 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. If he had seen a Nō performance, he must have been disillusioned by the real, as an authentic performance of Nō may not conform to his theory (his idea of the Über-marionette). It matters little if there was a real similarity between Craig’s idea and that of Asian theatre: Craig’s view on Japanese theatre (and Asian theatre in general), much like Appia’s, was racially and culturally conditioned and predetermined.

Thus, unlike Meyerhold and Brecht, two professed materialists who consciously disregarded the historical, cultural, and aesthetic contexts of Asian theatre in their appropriation (displacement) and contextualization (re-placement) of its ideas and forms, Craig, precisely because of his racially and culturally determined approach to Asian theatre, was not only opposed to the Occidental imitation and appropriation of Asian ideas, forms, and techniques, but was highly conscious of the increasing danger that the very knowledge of the East could present to the identity of Western tradition. In this regard, Craig, more conversant with Asian theatre than Appia, went even further in his negative—seen from our contemporary globalized perspective—approach to Asian theatre than his German “self.”