An American Actress
Anna Cora. The Life and Theatre of Anna Cora Mowatt. By Eric Barnes. (Seeker and Warburg, 25s.) AT a careless glance this looks Horridly like one of the usual doctorate theses which, with ghost-written autobiographies, make up too high a proportion of American theatre books. Like Portia's leaden casket, it rather threatens than promises, but is well worth choosing. Anna Cora Mowatt's life had a good curtain to every act; so had the mass-produced romantic dramas which flourished when she did on the American and English stage. She was born in France, nearly lost in a storm at sea, made a runaway marriage at fifteen, became successively a writer, a diseuse, a dramatist, a Swedenborgivi, and a successful actress, married a second time, and died at Wimbledon.
Everything bounds on from one crisis or triumph to another so that you might easily think Mr. Barnes had invented Anna Cora, or at any rate much embellished her life. But it is all true, even if slightly magnified by being largely taken from Mrs. Mowatt's autobiography, and she was not a woman to understate her own genius. She must have been a moving and possibly a powerful actress (though Joseph Jefferson contemptuously writes her off in a para- graph about the dangers of amateurs taking leading parts), but it is quickly proved that she was at least what we now call a 'personality'—that if there had been television, she would have been on it, looking pretty and expressing decided views in some panel show. The quality of excitement in Eric Barnes's book is no more than the slightly high-pitched writing of a man who has found a good story and wants everybody to hear it. In the end I think he establishes that she was a remarkable actress. Some idea of her pace of attack can be got from the fact that she mastered the part of Belvidera in Venice Preserv'd in twenty-four hours and played it with only one rehearsal. In less than a month she took sixteen leading parts, six of them new to her, and although this was not, in the 1840s, regarded as too much to ask from an actress, it disposes of any hint that she was merely an inspired amateur.
She arrived at a moment crucial to the development of an American theatre as distinct from the English. The first native
trama, The Indian Princess, or La Belle Sauvage, was done at he Park Theatre, New York, in 1809. It was only thirty-six years later that Anna Cora's Fashion showed itself the first comedy with a 100 per cent. American attitude towards its own times. New York, for stage purposes, still remained a suburb of London, but the seeds of Broadway were sown. Mrs. Mowatt had a lot to do with the sowing of them.
GERARD FAY
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