Twenty years must have passed since Miss Janet Achurch gave her astounding performance in Manchester of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. It was a performance so remarkable, so electrifying, that the old Queen’s Theatre in Quay Street became, for a time, the centre of theatrical interest for the whole of England. What London critic nowadays goes to Manchester, or anywhere else more than five miles from [208] ]home, to witness a Shakespeare play? Yet they all went to see Miss Achurch. I remember a cheeky and brilliant article by Bernard Shaw in The Saturday Review on Miss Achurch, another by Clement Scott in The Daily Telegraph, a third by William Archer in (I think) The World.
For myself, I saw the play seventeen times, and though I have seen many other actresses interpret Cleopatra, I have not known one whose performance could rank with the gorgeous presentation by Miss Achurch.
All my visits to the Queen’s were surreptitious, for I was brought up in a family that not only hated the theatre as an evil place but feared it also. Though I was but a boy I had a certain amount of freedom, for I was studying medicine at the Victoria University, and many afternoons that should have been spent in dissecting human feet and eyes were passed in the gallery of Flanagan’s theatre.
I suppose I must have been in love with Miss Achurch, though the kind of feeling that a boy sometimes has for a great emotional actress is more akin to worship than love. I longed to approach my divinity, but feared to do so. I wrote about her in local papers, and I remember a curious weekly called Northern Finance which, for some dark reason or other, printed, among its news of stocks and shares, a crude, bubbling article of mine on Miss Achurch. I sent all my articles to her and, with the colossal impudence of youth, and driven by a schoolboy curiosity, asked for an interview.
She wrote to me. Reader, are you young enough to remember how you felt when you first saw Miss Ellen Terry? Can you recall your adoration, your devotion?... Those days of young worship, how fine they are! Novelists always laugh at calf love because they cannot write about it and make it as beautiful as it really is. Like many other things that are human, calf love is [209] ]absurd and beautiful, noble and silly, profound and superficial. But, unlike so many things that are human, there is nothing about it that is mean and selfish, nothing that is not proud and good.
Yes, she wrote to me and invited me to visit her. She was kind and gracious.... Amused? Oh, I have no doubt she was amused, but she never betrayed it.
I used to hang about the stage door in the dark to watch her go into the theatre or come out of it. I scraped up an acquaintance with several members of the orchestra, for I thought I saw in them a kind of magic borrowed from her. Her hotel was a castle.
Those of my readers who never saw Miss Achurch in what theatrical writers call her “palmy” days can have only a very faint conception of her genius. She became ill: her beauty faded. Only rarely did one see her on the stage.
Years later I saw her in Ibsen’s Ghosts and, again much later, in a small part in Masefield’s adaptation of Wiers-Jennsen’s The Witch. She was wonderful in both plays, but the grandeur had departed, the glory almost gone.
It is most sadly true that actors live only in their own generation. Janet Achurch ought to have lived for ever. She will not be forgotten while we who saw her live; but we cannot communicate to others the genius we witnessed and worshipped.