Gordon Craig Set Design

Getting Started With Moving Screen Sets

Most people come to this approach thinking it's about minimalism. It's not. It's about spatial manipulation using flat planes and light, and it requires a completely different planning mindset than traditional scenic construction. If you've spent years building realistic painted flats and break-apart rooms, the first thing you'll struggle with is letting go of the idea that every wall needs to look like a wall. Gordon Craig Set Design originated from Edward Gordon Craig's theories around the early 1900s, but reading about it in a theatre history book won't help you actually build one. Here's what happens when you try to put it on a real stage with a real crew and a real budget.

The Gordon Craig Set Design Method

Craig rejected illustrated scenery. Instead he used tall, narrow screens mounted on wheels or hinges, placed at varying heights and angles across the stage. The combination of these planes with controlled lighting creates the illusion of space without painting trees or doors onto lumber. A single screen placed at a sharp angle reads as a wall in profile. Two screens at different heights read as a stairwell. Three screens with a color shift read as an interior at dusk. You stop thinking in terms of objects and start thinking in terms of compositional relationships. My first time working within this framework, I was hired to design a production of Brecht's Mother Courage using only screens and light. The director wanted a kitchen scene. I built four screens — two at full height, one at half height, one at two-thirds — in neutral grey with subtle color temperatures shifted by gel. That kitchen read clearly without a single prop shelf or painted backdrop. The trick was the lighting. Craig himself would have used gaslight-level dimming and practical lamps, but we had a modern lighting plot. I placed followspots behind the screens at low angles, creating long shadows that defined the kitchen doorway without constructing it. The shadow of a screen edge became the doorframe. The audience's brain fills in the rest.

Practical Workflow

Start by reading the script and marking every scene with its emotional temperature, not its location. A scene in a prison courtyard and a scene in a battlefield both read as cold, isolated spaces with the same screen palette — high contrast, sharp angles, narrow spacing. A love scene in a garden reads as warm, soft-edged, screens spaced wider with lower light angles. You end up with a mood map, not a floor plan. Build your screen designs at full scale on paper first. Standard proportions work best: anything from 4 feet wide by 8 to 12 feet tall. Going taller creates structural problems — screens over 10 feet become unstable without rigging, and you lose the ability to reposition them quickly between scenes. Going narrower defeats the purpose, since the screens need enough surface area to carry color and shadow meaningfully. I've seen designers make the mistake of using thin plywood or hardboard for the screen faces. It warps. A single screen warped by even a quarter inch throws off the entire composition when light hits it at a raking angle. Use 3/4 inch birch plywood or gator board with a framed rear support. The frame should be made from 1x2 lumber screwed into the plywood with pocket holes, then covered with canvas or muslin stretched tight and glued. Paint or dye the fabric surface. Fabric takes color better than paint and diffuses light more evenly across the surface.

Mount each screen on heavy-duty caster wheels with locking brakes. I prefer 4-inch swivel casters rated for at least 75 pounds each, because a 10-foot screen with a wooden frame and canvas face weighs roughly 40 to 50 pounds, and you need margin. Add a second set of smaller casters or glides on the bottom rail so the screen doesn't tip when pushed at an angle. One of my productions had a crew member push a screen too fast across a slightly uneven stage floor and it tipped forward onto the person behind it. That was a quick lesson in why weight distribution matters more than wheel quality. For hinge connections between screens, use piano hinges or heavy duty strap hinges. Craig's original designs sometimes had screens connected by fabric strips that allowed continuous movement. Replicating that with modern materials means using canvas straps bolted to the hinge points so the screens can pivot smoothly without developing play or wobble over time. Test every connection before painting. A hinge that sticks or binds will show up during a performance the moment the scene change is supposed to feel fluid. Lighting is where this method lives or dies. I can't stress this enough. Craig worked with natural light and early gaslight, which meant softer gradients and warmer color temperatures. Modern LED fixtures give you far more control, but they also make you lazy about light angles. If your key light is coming straight on from the front, the screens will look flat and decorative instead of architectural. Position your primary lights at 30 to 45 degree angles from the audience plane, and use a second bank of lights from the opposite side to create depth between the screens. Gobo projection on the screens adds texture without adding physical set pieces. A simple leaf or brick gobo at low intensity reads as environment.

Color strategy matters more than most designers realize. A screen painted a flat red will absorb light and look muddy under stage conditions. Use tinted fabrics or diluted dye washes instead of opaque paint. A screen dyed with a weak magenta wash over white muslin will glow when backlit and read as warm even in shadow. This is harder to achieve than it sounds because different light sources render colors differently. I always run a full tech rehearsal with the actual lighting instruments before approving final screen colors. What looks right under the daylight lamp in the workshop looks completely wrong under an ETC Source Four LED at 3200K.

Limitations and When Not to Use This Approach

This method does not work well for plays that demand specific, recognizable locations. If the script requires a detailed Victorian drawing room with specific furniture, an architectural element like a mantelpiece, or a transformation that depends on seeing the same room change appearance, screens alone will frustrate the production. You can suggest a mantelpiece with two angled screens and a low horizontal plane, but actors and audiences will want more specificity, and you'll spend half your budget building furniture anyway, defeating the purpose. It also doesn't scale well for very large stages without significant rigging infrastructure. Craig's ideal venue had high ceilings and enough flying space to raise screens out of the way. In a black box theatre with a grid at 18 feet, you can suspend some screens overhead for vertical variety, but you need a proper rigging plan and trained crew. Trying to hand-flight 10-foot screens during a show without a hanging system is how people get hurt. The biggest practical limitation is rehearsal time. Screen-based design requires actors to adjust their blocking to the planes you've created. A screen placed two feet upstage from where the director originally marked a downstage position changes the entire dynamic of a scene. Actors need time to learn sight lines and spatial relationships that don't exist in a traditional set. I budget at least three additional rehearsal days for blocking adjustments when working with this method, compared to standard scenic rehearsal schedules.

Another issue that comes up constantly is portability. If your production tours to multiple venues, you need a storage and transport system for the screens. I've designed roll-cages that hold six screens upright in custom slots, bolted to a standard Euro pallet. Each screen takes about 90 seconds to load or unload. Without a system like this, you're moving individual screens by hand, and screen damage becomes a real problem within the first week of touring. Cost is another factor. A single well-built 4x10 screen with canvas, frame, casters, hinges, and professional dyeing runs about $180 to $250 in materials. For a full production using eight screens, you're looking at roughly $1,500 to $2,000 in materials alone, not counting labor. Compare that to a traditional flat set where you might spend $800 on lumber and paint for six walls, but you also spend time building doors, windows, and built-ins that this method eliminates. The tradeoff shifts depending on whether you value material cost or labor hours.

A Common Mistake I See Repeatedly

Designers treat the screens as scenery instead of treating them as spatial dividers. The difference is important. Scenery says this is a wall. Spatial divider says this plane separates two emotional zones in the scene. When you think of screens as dividers, you place them based on dramatic function, not architectural logic. A screen doesn't need to connect to the floor. It can be suspended, tilted, or placed at an angle that defies physics. Craig understood this. The original designs for his productions often had screens hovering at odd heights or angles that would collapse in a realistic design. The stage becomes a living painting instead of a photograph of a room. If you're looking for reference material, Craig's own writings on the subject are available through Dover Publications and various university press archives. His concept of the über-marionette is closely related to this approach — the idea that the director shapes performers the way a marionettist shapes puppets, using space and light as the strings. It's a controversial concept, but it directly informed how Craig positioned actors in relation to his screens. Most designers ignore that connection and end up with beautiful screens and actors standing in front of them like they're waiting for a bus. The method has held up for over a century because it solves a real problem: how do you create atmosphere and spatial definition without building expensive, time-consuming realistic sets that take up all your budget and rehearsal time. It doesn't solve every problem. It fails when specificity is required, when venues lack the infrastructure, or when the production team doesn't understand how to use light as a primary design element. But when it works, it works cleanly and the results tend to look better than the planning suggests, which is rare in theatre design.