Everything was in tone, nothing cheap, nothing vulgar. Paintings hung on the walls, of Tree himself, and other great ones, good pictures by celebrated artists. Its main entrance can be seen to-day, but in Tree’s time, it was graced by footmen in powdered wigs and liveries. It did not matter what part of the house, you felt that this was an important place, where things happened. As soon as you entered it, you sensed the atmosphere. Simply to go to His Majesty’s was a thrill. According to the fondly nostalgic historian W. 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. 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. 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. James, George Alexander’s theatre around the corner, or the long-lived and often rebuilt Drury Lane and Covent Garden. 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. This not-so-subtle announcement used the rhetoric of what Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption. 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. Sachs, Modern Opera Houses and Theatres (London: B. The small crowns in the left floor plan represent the royal entrance and royal salon just outside the royal box. The floor plan on the right shows the dress circle level. The left floor plan shows the lower level which includes the stalls and pit. Cross section and floor plans of Her Majesty’s Theatre.
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