Majesty's Theatre Research Articles

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

Hybrid Creatures: Mrs Patrick Campbell’s Contributions to Pygmalion

This paper considers the role of actress Stella (Mrs Patrick) Campbell in the creation and reception of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, which premiered its first English-language production at His Majesty's Theatre in April 1914. Accounts of Pygmalion often perpetuate a narrative that presents Campbell as an egocentric performer who systematically dismantled Shaw's vision for the play and forced him to exert greater authorial control over its later incarnations. This paper reassesses Campbell's creative contribution to Pygmalion and the influence she had on the play's genesis and reception, focussing specifically on the impact of her continued association with the role of Paula in Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray, her landmark performance of 1893. Reading Paula and Eliza against each other – and through the body of Stella Campbell – I consider these characters as hybrid figures, a reading that in turn highlights Campbell's own hybrid status and her consequent displacement in the British theatrical establishment of the early twentieth century.

Dickens Goes to War: <I>David Copperfield</I> at His Majesty's Theatre, 1914

Dickens Goes to War: <I>David Copperfield</I> at His Majesty's Theatre, 1914

“Well, I'm Dashed!”

“Well, I'm Dashed!”

Much Ado about The Tempest: London Opera Politics, Intercultural Incomprehension, and Felix Mendelssohn

The eventual failure of Mendelssohn's sporadically intense involvement with operatic life in 1840s London is much less surprising when analyzed using methodologies of miscommunication adapted from current intercultural research. For the English, Mendelssohn was potentially as brightly burning an operatic star as Weber or Meyerbeer, an assessment optimistically based more on fervent hope than appropriate achievement. However, a closer look at largely unpublished documents relating to Mendelssohn's Shakespearian opera commissions, The Tempest for Her Majesty's Theatre, and A Winter's Tale for Covent Garden, uncovers a surprising story of ineptitude and missed opportunities. The composer found himself “double-dating” the main London opera houses during a protracted operatic courtship, while simultaneously stringing along librettists Eugène Scribe in Paris and Felice Romani in Italy. In the process, he only narrowly avoided alienating Emanuel Geibel, author of his opera-in-progress in Germany, Die Lorelei. The naivety of Mendelssohn's reaction to the collapse of his cosmopolitan operatic visions, and the dismay routinely expressed by his disappointed collaborators, were classic cases of intercultural misunderstanding.

"... ponderously pedantic pediments prevail ... good, clean fun in a bad, dirty world": New Zealand Architecture in the 1980s

The 1980s in New Zealand started with Robert Muldoon as Prime Minister: "Think Big," the Springbok Tour, the price freeze, and the establishment of Kōhanga Reo. These conflicting messages of expansion, contraction, and of race and politics were contextualised by high inflation (15.7% in 1981, 17.6% in 1982) and increasing unemployment (over 70,000 in 1981; c130,000 in 1983). In 1983 the CER (Closer Economic Relations) agreement with Australia was signed. In 1986 a GST (Goods and Services Tax) was first introduced. In October 1987, the sharemarket crash devastated many and reduced the number of cranes dominating the skylines of New Zealand's major cities. Building sites became car parks, and a new era of economic rationalisation would occur. In 1988 Broadcasting was de-regulated, NZPost (now an SOE) closed 432 post offices, and the selling of state assets to private interests was put in train. In 1989 GST increased to 12.5% and the Serious Fraud Office was established.It was also a decade of drama in New Zealand architecture. Significant controversies arose over buildings being built or being demolished, the economies of land value and building worth were in constant comparision. Of note were the discussions around the unrealised National Art Gallery, Roger Walker's now demolished Wellington Club the Aotea Centre in Auckland,the destruction of William Pitt's His Majesty's Theatre, and finally the National Museum of New Zealand, known these days as Te Papa. Controversies included protests against the recurring lack of open competitions for major public buildings, as well as the dominant disregard for architectural heritage.

“In Mute Despair”: Early Silent Films of The Tempest and their Theatrical Referents

This essay argues that silent Shakespeare films of the transitional era are marked de facto by inner conflict as they attempt to honour a set of divergent allegiances: to stage and screen, word and image, textual fidelity and filmic autonomy, inherited iconographies and vital performance, plot and spectacle, high culture and popular culture, heritage and topicality, “author” and market, acts of memorializing, and acts of making new. The 1908 one-reel film of The Tempest released by the English film production company Clarendon and directed by Percy Stow provides a particularly clear example of these divided allegiances. The film was not directly derived from a stage production but clearly trades upon some of the detail, and the driving political premises, of the Herbert Beerbohm Tree production of The Tempest that had been mounted at His Majesty's Theatre four years previously. In the process of tracing the specific links between the film and the earlier stage production, this essay describes the oscillating presentational codes of this film that veer between the joyously and explosively cinematic and the conservatively inhibited and stagy. Even in its accommodation of contradictory influences and internal dislocations, however, the 1908 Tempest film is eloquent about the priorities and predispositions of the film industry of its moment, and about contemporary approaches to adapting Shakespeare for the silent screen.

The Architecture of Conspicuous Consumption: Property, Class, and Display at Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Her Majesty's Theatre

The Architecture of Conspicuous Consumption: Property, Class, and Display at Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Her Majesty’s Theatre David Schulz (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Line drawing of Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1897. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Reprinted with permission. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Her Majesty’s Theatre auditorium in 1897 including a partial view of the proscenium, the boxes, the stalls, the dress circle, and the upper circle. Source: E. O. Sachs, Modern Opera Houses and Theatres (London: B. T. Batsford, 1897). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Cross section and floor plans of Her Majesty’s Theatre. The left floor plan shows the lower level which includes the stalls and pit. The floor plan on the right shows the dress circle level. The small crowns in the left floor plan represent the royal entrance and royal salon just outside the royal box. Source: E. O. Sachs, Modern Opera Houses and Theatres (London: B. T. Batsford, 1897). When actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree opened Her Majesty’s Theatre on 28 April 1897 with the performance of Seats of the Mighty by Gilbert Parker, he announced to all of London that he was a man of means and the leading actor-manager of his generation. This not-so-subtle announcement used the rhetoric of what Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption. 1 Her Majesty’s Theatre was built during the height of the late nineteenth-century commodity boom, unlike other theatres that adapted to it, such as the Haymarket, across the street from the new Her Majesty’s and where Tree formerly produced, or the St. James, George Alexander’s theatre around the corner, or the long-lived and often rebuilt Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Her Majesty’s is more fully a product of the period and style for which it was built, dominated by a conspicuous display of wealth, imperialism, and the Edwardian fetishization of French style. A monument to the actor-manager who built it, Her Majesty’s was also a monument to the fusion of conspicuous consumption and the prestige of the ruling bloc, the Society audience and taste-makers, for whom Tree and his brother managers posed as gentlemen-hosts. The attraction of Her Majesty’s Theatre was at least twofold: audiences came to be the (paying) guests of one of the leading actor-managers of the time and to witness and participate in a commodity-driven spectacle. According to the fondly nostalgic historian W. Macqueen-Pope: Simply to go to His Majesty’s was a thrill. As soon as you entered it, you sensed the atmosphere. It did not matter what part of the house, you felt that this was an important [End Page 231] place, where things happened. Its main entrance can be seen to-day, but in Tree’s time, it was graced by footmen in powdered wigs and liveries. Paintings hung on the walls, of Tree himself, and other great ones, good pictures by celebrated artists. Everything was in tone, nothing cheap, nothing vulgar. 2 Notably, with characteristic opportunism, Tree opened his theatre during the Diamond Jubilee year, 1897, associating the new structure with an actual imperial celebration. Attracting audiences from the city and outlying suburban districts of an expanding London, West End theatres like Her Majesty’s functioned as landmarks in a landmark district. While it failed to achieve a lasting cultural status like the Covent Garden Opera House, Her Majesty’s was in its time an important element in the urban fabric of the London West End. In particular, it functioned as a place for the active production of a commodity spectacle onstage and in the auditorium, the lobbies, bars, and corridors. This spectacularization of consumer goods was an important social operation that was also happening in such places as department stores that proceeded Her Majesty’s by a mere two decades. Stores like Whiteley’s and Harrod’s amassed great amounts and variety of commodities for the convenience of the consumer. Whiteley’s fashioned itself the Universal Provider, while Harrod’s boasted “Everything for Everybody Everywhere.” Selfridge’s, a newcomer in 1909...

Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Percy Anderson at Her Majesty's Theatre

Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Percy Anderson at Her Majesty's Theatre

'Pepper's Ghost is Tearing Its Hair': Ottawa Theatre in the 1870s

During the 1870s Ottawa audiences enjoyed a varied program of professional touring companies. Opera, drama, minstrel and one-man shows, as well as circuses visited the city. An analysis of the performance calendar of shows at Her Majesty's Theatre, the Rink Music Hall, Gowan's Opera House, and later the Opera House reveals Ottawa's prominent position on the south-eastern Ontario touring circuit during the nineteenth century.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree's King Henry VIII: Expenditure, Spectacle and Experiment

Soon after breakfast-time on the morning of 1 September 1910 ‘suburban ladies with their camp stools, sandwiches, and crochet work took up position outside the pit and gallery doors’ at His Majesty's Theatre in London's Haymarket; later they were joined by messenger boys reserving places for more affluent enthusiasts, and by the time the doors opened at 6.15 p.m. the queue had swelled to the extent that only half could be admitted. Amongst the more privileged members of the audience which thronged the theatre that Thursday evening were to be seen Prince Francis of Teck, the Ranee of Sarawak and Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle, a notable turn-out at a time of year when, according to Vanity Fair, ‘London is supposed to be deserted by that fraction of the population whose absence or presence causes it to be designated as empty or full’. Such intense anticipation is rarely generated by a theatrical event, yet throughout that summer the press had dutifully recorded the latest developments in what was to prove to be Herbert Beerbohm Tree's most lavish Shakespearian production King Henry VIII. Whilst the press and public eagerly awaited the latest Bardic offering (his fourteenth) from the foremost actor-manager of the day, his theatre, from his office in the dome downwards, was a bustle of activity involving actors, designers, costumiers, and all the other participants in a great theatrical enterprise. Tree's own grasp on the mechanics and economics of theatre production was legendarily vague, but, fortunately for him and indeed for us, those matters were handled and meticulously recorded by his manager Henry Dana, and it is through Dana's account books, now in the Tree Archive in the Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol, that the financial framework, on which was to be placed the sumptuous spectacle of Henry VIII, can be found.

Strange Images of Death: Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Macbeth, 1911

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) is a perplexing figure in Shakespearean stage history. At the turn of the century and in the decade following, he was esteemed as Irving's successor, the pre-eminent Shakespearean actor and producer in Great Britain. That reputation rested largely on his great “revivals” of Shakespeare at Her (later His) Majesty's Theatre. Highly regarded in his own day, Tree is now commonly thought of as a somewhat ludicrous impressario: “He was at heart a comedian, a character actor, a make-up artist specializing in the eccentric,” writes Charles H. Shattuck in his authoritative history of Shakespeare in performance. And, Shattuck continues, Tree's staging is remembered chiefly for its “tricky business, tableaux and dumbshows,” the kind of elaborate, literal-minded stage “illustration” which put a barge onstage in Antony and Cleopatra and live rabbits in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is easy to laugh at Tree's excesses, as many have, because so little is known about his achievements. For until 1974 the Tree promptbooks and theatre records (scrapbooks with complete newspaper reviews) were controlled by the Tree Estate, and were therefore all but inaccessible to scholars. Lacking the direct evidence of reviews and promptbooks, theatre historians have relied on the harsh judgments of Tree's enemies—chiefly George Bernard Shaw and A. B. Walkley of the London Times—who denounced Tree in favor of William Poel, Gordon Craig, and Harley Granville-Barker.

The Distribution of Sound in Her Majesty's Theatre, Sydney

Summary A survey of the sound levels at representative seats in Her Majesty's Theatre, Sydney, was undertaken in order to gain some experience of the sound levels in an auditorium which has proved to be acoujtically satisfaitory. The source was a loudspeaker emitting white noise with a directional pattern and level comparable with various types of soloists. The observations were conducted in the early morning to avoid biassed readings due to high bixkground noise which at that time proved to be negligible.

"The Nibelung's Ring" at Her Majesty's Theatre

"The Nibelung's Ring" at Her Majesty's Theatre

Her Majesty's Theatre Scheme

Her Majesty's Theatre Scheme

Johanna Wagner. Her Majesty's Theatre Association. The Festivals

Johanna Wagner. Her Majesty's Theatre Association. The Festivals