Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Upon his return to England, he began performing with amateur troupes, eventually using the name Herbert Beerbohm Tree, while working in his father's business.
[4] In 1878, Tree played Grimaldi in Dion Boucicault's The Life of an Actress at the Globe Theatre; shortly after, he began his professional career.
The contrast between this dashing Italian spy and his timid parson in Hawtrey's play, showed his versatility as a character actor.
The same year, in London, he made a success at the Haymarket Theatre, in the character role of Baron Harzfeld in Jim the Penman by Charles Young.
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.
While popular farces and melodramas like Trilby anchored the repertoire (the production ran for an extraordinary 260 performances),[4] 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.
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.
[6] With the profits he had accumulated at the Haymarket, Tree helped finance the rebuilding of Her Majesty's Theatre in grand Louis XV style.
[10]Tree opened his theatre in 1897 during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year, associating the new structure with an imperial celebration.
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 noted actors as Constance Collier, Ellen Terry, Madge Kendal, Winifred Emery, Julia Neilson, Violet Vanbrugh, Oscar Asche, Arthur Bourchier, and Lewis Waller.
[4] Tree often starred in the theatre's dramatisations 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 dramatisation 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).
[6] Tree overturned the popular wisdom at the time that Shakespeare productions would lose money, creating stagings that appealed widely to patrons.
In fact, the theatre's first Shakespearian play, Julius Caesar, was its first commercial success in 1898, running for 165 consecutive performances and selling 242,000 tickets.
[4] Tree staged the Shakespeare plays, in particular, to appeal to the broad public taste for realistic scenery and scenic effects and lavish spectacle, mirroring the Edwardian fashion for luxury and extravagance.
For example, in The Winter's Tale (1906), there was a woodland glade with a shepherd's cottage and babbling brook; in The Tempest (1904), a replica of a sixteenth-century vessel was tossed in a storm; in The Merchant of Venice (1908), he recreated an authentic Renaissance ghetto.
We hear a great deal of cant talked by those who insist that the ideal stage setting should be a green baize, whose decoration should consist of placards inscribed, "This is a street," "This is a house," "This is heaven."
"[13]Tree sometimes interpolated scenes of famous historical events into the plays to provide even more spectacle, such as King John's granting of Magna Carta or Anne Boleyn's coronation in Westminster Abbey.
Charles Urban filmed the opening shipwreck from the 1904 revival of The Tempest at the theatre in 1905; Tree, whose role in the production was Caliban, did not appear in this scene.
[14] Tree played Cardinal Wolsey in a 1911 studio film by William Barker of a five-scene version of Henry VIII, based on the theatre's 1910 production.
Tree was paid the unprecedented sum of £1,000 lest the film prove unsatisfactory, or damage ticket sales of the theatre presentation.
His diligent preparation and attention to detail in make-up, gesture, body position and facial expression allowed him to inhabit these roles.
He used his expressive eyes to project such varied emotions as "the dreamy languor of Hamlet during his moments of reflection and the baleful hatred of Shylock towards his persecutors to the nervous fear of Richard II during his surrender at Flint Castle.
His Malvolio was a swaggering and conceited fool, King John a superstitious and deceitful coward, and Macbeth a neurotic and self-torturing monarch.
[7] During performance, Tree allowed inspiration to suggest to him appropriate stage business, which sometimes lead to inconsistent interpretations in his portrayals of a role.
The Manchester Guardian wrote, "The wonderful thing about him was his amazing versatility, and there was an intellectual virility, an untiring earnestness about the man, which was irresistibly stimulating.
His spectacles, too, in comparison with the experimental methods of Poel and other producers, seemed outdated, although Tree responded to his critics by noting that his productions remained profitable and well attended.
[25] The songwriter Maude Valérie White dedicated her setting of Byron's song "So we'll go no more a-roving" to Tree, "in grateful remembrance of 13 July 1888".
