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

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

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...