Herbert Beerbohm Tree - Theatre Manager and Leading Roles

Theatre Manager and Leading Roles

In 1887, at age thirty-four, Tree took over the management of the Comedy Theatre in the West End of London. His first production was a successful run of the Russian revolutionary play The Red Lamp by W. Outram Tristram, in which Tree took the role of Demetrius.

Later in the year, he became the manager of the prestigious Haymarket Theatre. Since the departure of the Bancrofts in 1885, that theatre's reputation had suffered, which Tree's tenure there restored. He produced and appeared on stage in some thirty plays during this decade. While popular farces and melodramas like the stage adaptation of Trilby anchored the repertoire (the production ran for an extraordinary 260 performances), Tree also encouraged the new drama, staging Maeterlinck's The Intruder (1890), Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1893) and Wilde's A Woman of No Importance (1893), among others. He supported new playwrights by producing special "Monday night" performances of their new plays. Tree also mounted critically acclaimed productions of Hamlet (1892), Henry IV, Part 1 (1896) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1889), establishing himself as a Shakespearean leading man. The Times thought his Hamlet a "notable success", but not everyone agreed: W.S. Gilbert said of it, "I never saw anything so funny in my life, and yet it was not in the least vulgar." In 1889 Tree also produced Charles Haddon Chambers's play The Tyranny of Tears. His Haymarket seasons were broken by American visits in January 1895 and November 1896, and occasional visits to the provinces.

With the profits he had accumulated at the Haymarket, Tree helped financed the rebuilding of Her Majesty's Theatre in grand and tasteful Louis XV style, which he then owned and managed. He lived in the theatre from its completion in 1897 until his death in 1917. For his personal use, he had a banqueting hall and living room installed in the massive, central, square French-style dome. The theatre historian W. J. MacQueen-Pope, wrote of the theatre, "Simply to go to His Majesty's was a thrill. As soon as you entered it, you sensed the atmosphere ... In Tree's time it was graced by footmen in powdered wigs and liveries ... Everything was in tone, nothing cheap, nothing vulgar." Tree opened his theatre during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year, 1897, associating the new structure with an imperial celebration.

Over the next two decades, Tree staged approximately sixty plays there, programming a repertory at least as varied as he had at the Haymarket. his first production at Her Majesty's was a dramatization of Gilbert Parker's The Seats of the Mighty. Tree mounted new plays by prominent British playwrights, such as Carnac Sahib (1899) by Henry Arthur Jones. His productions were exceptionally profitable; they were famous, most of all, for their elaborate and often spectacular scenery and effects. Unlike some other famous actor-managers, Tree engaged the best actors available to join his company and hired the best designers and composers for the plays with incidental music. His productions starred such famous and talented actors as Constance Collier, Ellen Terry, Madge Kendal, Winifred Emery, Julia Neilson, Violet Vanbrugh, Oscar Asche, Arthur Bourchier, and Lewis Waller.

Tree often starred in the theatre's dramatizations of popular nineteenth-century novels, such as Sydney Grundy's adaptation of Dumas's Musketeers (1898); Tolstoy's Resurrection (1903); Dickens's Oliver Twist (1905), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1908) and David Copperfield (1914); and Morton's dramatization of Thackeray's The Newcomes, called Colonel Newcome (1906), among others. Tree staged many contemporary verse dramas by Stephen Phillips and others, including Herod (1900), Ulysses (1902), Nero (1906) and Faust (1908). Adaptations of classic foreign plays included Beethoven by Louis Parker, an adaptation of the play by Réné Fauchois (1909); A Russian Tragedy, an English version by Henry Hamilton of the play by Adolph Glass (1909); and The Perfect Gentleman by W. Somerset Maugham, an adaptation of the classic Molière play, Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1913). The classical repertory included such works as The School for Scandal (1909). Tree also programmed popular melodramas, farces, romantic comedies and premieres, such as George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, in 1914, in which Tree played Henry Higgins opposite the Eliza of Mrs Patrick Campbell. The actor John Gielgud wrote, "Rehearsing Pygmalion with Tree she must have been impossible. They were both such eccentrics. They kept ordering each other out of the theatre with Shaw in the middle, trying to cope with them." Tree also took his productions on tour in America many times and visited Berlin's Royal Opera House in 1907 at the invitation of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Gilbert remarked that Tree had been invited by the Kaiser "with the malignant motive of showing the Germans what impostors we all are."