Resource | Text: Article | |
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Title | Her Majesty's Theatre Brisbane | |
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Source | Philip Parsons, Victoria Chance, Companion To Theatre In Australia, Currency Press with Cambridge University Press, Sydney, NSW, 1995 | |
Page | 268-269 | |
Date Issued | 1995 | |
Language | English | |
Citation | Ross Thorne, Her Majesty's Theatre Brisbane, Companion To Theatre In Australia, 1995, 268-269 | |
Resource Identifier | 64876 |
Provide feedback on Her Majesty's Theatre Brisbane
Theatre in Queen Street, opened 2 April 1888 as Her Imperial Majesty's Opera House, seating 2200. Architect: Stombucco and Son. Originally owned by G. Byrne and leased by C. H. Holmes. Leased by Harold Ashton and reopened as His Majesty's Theatre 23 March 1901. Rebuilt and reopened 30 March 1929, seating 1387. Architect: Cedric Ballantyne or George McLeish. Later renamed Her Majesty's. Demolished 1983.
Until the Queensland Performing Arts Complex was built the only Brisbane theatre with a stage that could take the scenery of productions toured from Melbourne or Sydney by subsidised companies was Her Majesty's Theatre. When it was built as Her Imperial Majesty's Opera House, with a hotel in front, it looked grand indeed. It rose high above all other buildings in Queen Street, palatial, almost voluptuous, encrusted with more heavily modelled decoration in the Victorian Italianate style than any of them. The theatre was designed to seat 1200 persons on the ground floor - 500 in the stalls and 700 in the pit. Closely spaced, substantial cast-iron posts supported the 400-seat dress circle and above it the 600-seat 'family circle', which was not initially called a gallery. The daughter of W. H. Wallace, who managed the theatre from 1901 to 1928, remembered 'packers' being employed to squeeze patrons into this uppermost balcony. A good packer could squeeze in an extra 50.
The stage measured 18 metres by 19 metres. The proscenium was decorated with gold-painted Corinthian columns, but the auditorium was otherwise almost devoid of decorative plasterwork. The theatre opened with the new style of maroon velvet house curtain instead of the traditional scenic act-drop and green baize curtain. The auditorium lighting was originally gas but converted to electricity about two years later. Earthenware pipes and windows provided ventilation until 1901, when the architect William Pitt was commissioned to undertake minor alterations, including a sliding roof.
In 1929 His Majesty's Theatre reopened after major rebuilding of the auditorium and foyers. Reports are not clear on who was the architect responsible for the design, which provided a more comfortable theatre, in many ways more like a picture palace than a traditional theatre. There was now a single deep balcony, unsupported by posts in the stalls below. Two decorative but rather useless boxes were cantilevered from the side walls near the proscenium. All was decorated in a deeply modelled Renaissance-rococo style. The Brisbane Courier said the theatre presented a 'charming spectacle'. It quickly became the venue for major lyric and dramatic performances, especially those toured by the large entrepreneurs. The AMP Society bought the site from Byrne Hart and his sons in 1973, promising that it would build a new theatre when it developed this and adjacent sites. But in 1980 AMP sold the theatre to another developer, who demolished it in 1983. At that time there was criticism of the seating rake and backstage conditions.