Herbert Beerbohm Tree took over the Haymarket Theatre from the Bancrofts in 1885
before moving to his newly built Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1897. His programme at the Haymarket featured plays by Shakespeare, Oscar
Wilde and Henry Arthur Jones.
Tree was an outstanding character actor. One of his great roles was Svengali the hypnotist. Tree loved makeup and he would thickly plaster his somewhat plain face and bedeck
himself with crepe hair and wigs.
At Her Majesty’s, Tree presented spectacular productions with detailed and realistic settings and huge crowd scenes. eal rabbits allegedly ran about the wood in A
Midsummer Night’s
Dream; real grass grew on the stage in Twelfth Night and he presented such a realistic shipwreck in The Tempest with water washing over the deck
that many in the audience felt slightly queasy.
Like other Victorian actor-managers he cut Shakespeare’s text to allow for additional stage spectacle. Antony’s return to Alexandria in Antony and Cleopatra became
a surging crowd scene with processions of priests and military marchers, strewn flowers and clashing cymbals and dancing women. The audience sat through long intervals
whilst massive sets were changed and Shakespeare’s text was rearranged to prevent too many scene changes.
Tree also commissioned new plays to exploit his love of spectacle and show off the expertise of the stage technicians. In Nero Rome burned so realistically that the more
nervous among the audience got ready to leave, whilst in Joseph and His Brethren the entire fauna of Palestine was represented including camels, oxen, sheep, asses, goats
- none of which helped the aroma backstage. But audiences loved it.
As an actor Tree was at his best concealed in makeup - he had one of those nondescript faces without dominating features that take makeup well and was never happier than
when he was smothered in crepe hair and Leichner greasepaint. It was metamorphosis rather than acting and so thrilling that as one observer wrote:
“even when he was hopelessly miscast Tree’s acting was so clever, so inventive, so varied, so intensely interesting, that for unalloyed entertainment
one would rather see him in a bad play than anyone else in a good one.”
Tree produced plays not only by Oscar Wilde but also Ibsen at a time when
Ibsen’s work was very unfashionable, and considered morally deranged. In 1914 Tree was the
first Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Eliza was played by the celebrated Mrs Patrick Campbell. Tree almost abandoned the script and introduced
the hint of a happy ending by throwing a bunch of flowers to Eliza between the end of the play and the fall of the curtain ‘My ending makes money, you ought to be
grateful’ said Tree to Shaw.
Tree died in 1917.
Introduction
The Old Price Riots
