Lena Ashwell extract
Table of Contents
1. Actress: early performing career
2. Actress-manager
3. Pioneer, 1908 to 1914
4. Patriot, 1915 to 1919
5. Pioneer and patriot: the Lena Ashwell Players
6. 1930 to 1957
Appendix 1 Ashwell as actress: plays, roles and theatres in which she appeared
Appendix 2 Lena Ashwell Players: touring schedule, 1919–1929
Appendix 3 Lena Ashwell Players: repertoire
Appendix 4 Members of the Lena Ashwell Players
Extract from Lena Ashwell
Taken from Chapter 1: Actress: early performing career
Others recognised her strong inclination to naturalism. An admirer, John Glover, wrote: ‘I have never witnessed or listened to anything that stirred me so deeply, and made me experience so keen enjoyment as your natural acting … I have no object but to express my deep obligation for a benefit conferred, and for the revelation afforded of what true acting is.’27 She then experienced the rigours of provincial touring, described with wry humour in Myself a Player, and gave promotional interviews to local newspapers, declaring to the Blackpool Gazette that she was ‘the property of Mr Carr for two years, wailing [sic] like a famous character in fiction, for something to turn up’.28 When asked why she had gone on the stage, when originally educated to be a governess, she responded: ‘I think you must see that I would not probably have been much of a success as a governess, and I do like to get on in whatever I take up.’29
In 1895 Ashwell had a rare opportunity: to play with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in Comyns Carr’s King Arthur, which opened at the Lyceum on 12 January. As the Queen pointed out: ‘It is always promotion for a young actress to go to the Lyceum, even though it be to take a part smaller than some she may have already played.’30 As Elaine (she was also Terry’s understudy), Ashwell was noticed, attracting favourable reviews: ‘The actress spoke from her heart, and when she was not speaking she was showing the workings of her soul; an art that few young actresses understand.’31 She adored Irving, but her first experience in his company was not easy. Irving’s grandson, Laurence, writes that Terry’s ‘undisguised partiality for Frank Cooper’, 32 who was playing Mordred, set tongues wagging and Ashwell was distressed ‘to discover an undercurrent of petty rivalries and conspiracies in what she looked upon as a hallowed temple of the art in which she was so earnest an initiate. One night, in the wings, Irving found her in tears. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, adding by way of kindly consolation, “You know – we were born crying”.’33 Golding Bright wrote with unqualified praise of her performance as Elaine, but sensed tension in her demeanour. He felt she was overworking herself to an alarming extent:
Ambition in a young actress is highly commendable; but do not, let me implore you, carry it too far. You have done well … since I saw you play the blind girl in Young Mrs Winthorp at an amateur entertainment, which first gave me a hint of hidden powers. Be advised and take a good rest … Nature will have its revenge for hours stolen from sleep and given to study, and a breakdown is to be dreaded.34
But for Ashwell, despite these tensions, it was a ‘golden time … I was in the seventh heaven. The stage-door of the Lyceum is still the same, and I can’t pass it now without a thrill.’35 The run of King Arthur was an emotional time: Oscar Wilde was arrested and, she remembered, ‘the atmosphere of London was horrible and cruel. His plays were so very brilliant, and I had seen him when I was in Lady Windermere’s Fan, so I felt that he was a friend in desperate trouble.’36 She also knew the Terry/Irving partnership was breaking up. There were a number of influences at work, but ‘the great difficulty was that there were few leading parts for the mature woman. All the heroines were young. Heroes might be any age, but the older women were merely backgrounds to the drama.’37 Later, Ashwell was deeply affected by the fact that Terry, for financial reasons, was giving ‘one-night stand’ American lecture tours at the age of 65: ‘Almost all the histories are tragic of those who devote their lives to art.’38
27 Letter from Glover to Ashwell, 14 August 1894 (Lena Ashwell Papers, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y.).
28 Blackpool Gazette, 28 September 1894.
29 Topical Times, 6 October 1894.
30 Queen, 19 January 1895.
31 Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1895.
32 L. Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and His World (London, 1951), 595. Laurence was a friend of Ashwell’s, and presumably this is an anecdote told directly to him.
33 Ibid.
34 Letter from Golding Bright to Ashwell, 16 January 1895 (Lena Ashwell Papers, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y.).
35 Ashwell, Myself a Player, 79.
36 Ibid., 80.
37 Ibid., 81.
38 Ibid., 82.