We celebrate and remember Ellen Terry as a great actress of the Victorian period, but we need also to ascribe to her records the promotion of early twentieth-century modernist theatre: she indeed financed and supported the bold innovative enterprises of her son Edward Gordon Craig, The Purcell Operatic Society (1901–4) and of her daughter Edith Craig and the Pioneer Players (1911–25). Both enterprises, different as they were, paved the way for the modernist shift towards a director's theatre in England.

In this chapter I wish to contribute to the evaluation and discussion of Edith Craig as director, through the reconstruction and analysis of one of her most relevant achievements: a trilogy by Paul Claudel staged for the Pioneer Players during the war years. Unlike other aspects of the story of Edith Craig's play-producing society, the staging of this trilogy has been little investigated; however it is most useful in my opinion for arguing her directorial skills and authorship in theatre. It helps indeed to position Terry's daughter within the pioneer practices of other first-generation, twentieth-century directors: Granville Barker, Copeau, Lugné-Poe, her brother Edward Gordon Craig, and significant Russian, German and Eastern European colleagues.

The Claudel plays were premières for the English stage and opened in London between 1915 and 1919; the first one, Exchange (L'Echange), was staged during the Pioneer Players’ fourth season (Little Theatre, 2 May 1915);