Lena Ashwell: Actress, Patriot, Pioneer by Margaret Leask (review)

Margaret Leask begins Lena Ashwell: Actress, Patriot, Pioneer with a recollection of Ellen Terry’s, in which Terry remembers first taking note of a young actress named Lena Pocock, at the Royal Academy of Music, in 1890. Leask’s invocation of Terry serves as a fitting frame for her biography of Ashwell: an account of a woman whose work had long-lasting effects on the theatre, although little is known about her now because she worked in an era dominated by still-familiar names like Terry, Henry Irving, George Bernard Shaw, and Harley Granville Barker. Leask’s is the first biography written on Ashwell’s life; Ashwell herself wrote and published an autobiography in 1936 titled Myself a Player, but as Leask notes, “she provided little detail about or explanation for her work” (xvii).

Leask primarily focuses on Ashwell’s professional career – which is momentous – but it sometimes skims over the more personal details of her life. Her first marriage, to fellow actor Arthur Playfair, for instance, gets a few passing sentences amidst a detailed description of her early career, while Ashwell’s early life is covered in two pages. Similarly, the reader learns little about her long marriage to Dr. Henry Simson. The exploration of her professional career begins promptly on page two, with her 1891 debut in The Pharisee, at the Islington Grand Theatre (8, 2), and from there Leask launches into a detailed account of Ashwell’s performance work.

The first chapter explores her West End career, featuring collaborations with everyone from Henry Irving to Charles Wyndham to Beerbohm Tree. During this stage, Ashwell came to know the actor-manager system, observing, first hand, the varying methods and practices of the significant theatrical names of the Edwardian era. Leask’s strength in exploring Ashwell’s work is her inclusion of reviews of Ashwell’s performances. This not only provides context for the productions but also allows Leask to bring in the voices of reviewers like Shaw and William Archer.

The second and third chapters, titled “Actress-Manger” and “Pioneer, 1908–1914,” respectively, trace Ashwell’s trajectory as one of the first women to step into the male-dominated role of actor-manager. Following her West End popularity and a largely unsuccessful American tour, she found herself in a position to lease and renovate the Great Queen Street Theatre and rename it the Kingsway. It is here that Ashwell began to stand out from her male predecessors and to “relish[] her reputation as an individual” (71).

Her activities at the Kingsway showed the transitions in the British theatre world at the time, further heightened by the slow passing of the old: Henry Irving passed away in 1905, while Ashwell and her colleagues celebrated Ellen Terry’s Jubilee. Meanwhile, Ashwell sought out new plays and playwrights to feature as curtain raisers for her popular productions at the Kingsway; she found herself agreeing with Granville Barker that a state-subsidized repertory theatre was the most effective structure for cultivating a revival of meaningful, challenging British drama. Leask pieces together a detailed overview of Ashwell’s activities, from performances to her involvement in women’s suffrage and actors’ advocacy.

Leask focuses the fourth chapter on Ashwell’s work during World War I, from her YMCA Concert Parties to her fundraising performances and tours around England and France. Ashwell and her Concert Party members pushed themselves to serve the troops directly in France; members even wired her to describe concerts within a mile of the trench line being interrupted by artillery fire. They toured so extensively, performing thousands of concerts throughout the war, that the travelling troupes became known as “The Lenas” (149). Ashwell’s work during this period put her among the first women to receive the Order of the British Empire in 1917.

The extensive work of the Lena Ashwell Players is the core subject of the fifth chapter, and Leask traces a trajectory from the Players’ performances at various London venues to their eventual leasing...