Annie Horniman

Annie Horniman

Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman CH (born October 3, 1860 in Forest Hill, London Borough of Lewisham , England , † August 6, 1937 in Shere , Surrey ) was a British theater director and occultist . She was an heir to the Horniman Tea Company and co-founder and patron of the Abbey Theater in Dublin and the Gaiety Theater in Manchester . Horniman's productions marked the beginning of modern English-language theater.

Live and act

Interior view of the Horniman Museum in London

Annie Horniman came from a family of tea merchants. She was the eldest daughter of Frederick John Horniman and Rebekah Horniman and a sister of the liberal parliamentarian Emslie Horniman. Annie's paternal grandfather, a Quaker , was a wealthy tea importer who invented a forerunner of the modern tea bag , which earned the family the nickname “The Hornibags”. Annie's father converted from Quakerism to the Church of England and was a Member of Parliament for many years. The family fortune allowed him to go on long journeys, from which he brought numerous art-historically valuable exhibits with him for his private collection , on which he founded the later Horniman Museum in London .

Childhood and youth

Annie and her brother were taught only by governesses or tutors. Both developed a keen interest in the fine arts. A performance of the Merchant of Venice at the Crystal Palace , which she saw when she was 13, called Annie a trigger for her later passion for the theater. The theater became a passion for the Horniman siblings, and so they spent a lot of time with their own small productions in the children's room. As an adolescent, Annie began to rebel against her parents. She soon tried to defy the strict social conventions of her time, joined the emerging suffragette movement and demanded equality. She showed herself to be non-conformist in everything she did: She dressed eccentrically , smoked in public and began to be interested in borderline sciences . She believed in astrology , occultism, and theosophy and studied alternative cults .

Student days, Golden Dawn

Moina Mathers around 1887

From 1882 she attended the Slade School of Fine Art , an art school at the University of London . There she showed little artistic talent, but was able to make numerous important friendships. She especially befriended Mina Bergson, who had a similar penchant for mystical subjects as Annie. Mina, later better known as Moina Mathers , was the wife of the occultist Samuel L. MacGregor Mathers and founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (HOGD). Moina introduced Annie to the magical secret society . There she first met the Irish poet William Butler Yeats .

Florence Farr

In 1890 Annie Horniman was initiated in the "Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn" . Her magical motto was "Fortiter et Recte" ("brave and upright"). She rose quickly in the hierarchy of the order and was in 1893 "Sub-Praemonstratrix" of the temple. In the same year she received a considerable inheritance from her grandfather, which enabled her to live out her passion for the theater and to produce some of the plays for her fellow student Florence Farr , who was also a member of the Golden Dawn. In addition, she began to financially support the Mathers and the Golden Dawn. She had previously found MacGregor Mathers a short-term position as a curator at the Horniman Museum.

Around 1896 there was a final quarrel with Mathers, as Horniman found his toleration to the occult-sexual theories of Thomas Lake Harris , which were practiced by a member of the order, as immoral. She resigned from her post as a sub-premonstratrix and was finally expelled from the order by Mathers in December 1896 for insubordination. However, after the expulsion of Mathers by the Committee of the Second Order, she was rehabilitated and worked as the religious community's secretary until the final dissolution of the Golden Dawn in 1903.

Success as a dramaturge, friendship with Yeats

WB Yeats, 1920

In the following years Horniman devoted himself mainly to the theater. As early as 1894, with the support of her friend Florence Farr, she had produced a season of performances with experimental pieces by WB Yeats and George Bernard Shaw at the Avenue Theater in London. In order not to provoke the displeasure of her family, she initially preferred to work anonymously. The playing time, the Horniman as "fertile failure" ( english fruitful failure called), though was a financial disaster, but highly praised by critics. The plays marked the beginning of modern British theater, including Shaw's first stage adaptation Arms and the Man ( Heroes ) and Yeats' first London-staged play The Land of Heart's Desire . Annie Horniman became a great admirer of WB Yeats. In the following years she acted as his "right hand man" in London.

Annie's mother died in 1895, whereupon her 61-year-old father married a 21-year-old. Annie disapproved of this marriage and broke off contact with her family, including her brother. Annie later claimed that her father disinherited her as a result. In fact, measured against the immense wealth of the father, she is said to have received only a minor inheritance.

The Abbey Theater

The poster for the opening in 1904/05

Through her friendship with WB Yeats, Horniman became increasingly involved in the theater. In 1903 she designed the costumes for Yeats' play The King's Threshold . Yeats was one of the leading figures in the Irish National Theater, which at the time had no permanent venue. Horniman financed the ensemble and rented a disused factory hall, which she had converted. The Abbey Theater opened in December 1904 with plays by Yeats and Isabella Augusta Gregory , the founders of the theater. Horniman also subsidized the ensemble in the following years and thus made it possible, among other things, to purchase the most modern props. With increasing supraregional attention, the Abbey Theater also became a political issue, and so there were disputes with Irish nationalists who disapproved of the "patronage" by an Englishwoman. Eventually, an affront came about when the theater played on May 7, 1910, just a day after King Edward VII's death , in what was viewed as disrespect for the British Crown. Annie Horniman stopped her donations to the theater because of what the break with Yeats came about.

Gaiety Theater and the "Manchester School"

After the disappointment in Dublin, Horniman concentrated in the following years entirely on the Gaiety Theater in Manchester. With her father's legacy in the background, she had already recruited her own ensemble, the “Manchester Playgoers' Theater” in 1906, which experimented with new pieces away from the commercial stages. She found a talented producer in the dramaturge and actor Ben Iden Payne. As early as September 1907, the theater group had a successful first season with plays by Shaw, Edmond Rostand and Charles McEvoy. In 1908 Horniman acquired the Gaiety Theater, renovated it and had it equipped with the latest stage technology in order to offer its ensemble an adequate venue. In the years that followed, Annie Horniman's theater company surprised with a large repertoire that consisted of Greek tragedies and British classics as well as contemporary pieces by new playwrights.

The "Manchester School" arose out of modern theater work, which produced some well-known playwrights such as Harold Brighouse , Stanley Houghton and Allan Monkhouse . Annie Horniman herself soon became a cultural figure in Manchester; 1910 she was awarded the University of Manchester the Master of Arts honorary. The reputation of the Gaiety Theater soon reached the United States and Canada , where the company toured from 1912–1913. With the outbreak of the First World War , the theater ran into financial difficulties and was unable to build on its earlier successes even after the end of the war. A production of Julius Caesar turned into a financial disaster in 1917, whereupon Annie Horniman withdrew from the theater. In 1921 the now unprofitable theater was sold to a cinema company. Critics later accused Horniman of "just being bored with the project."

Later years

After the end of the Gaiety Theater, Annie Horniman contemplated founding a new repertory theater in London and looked for sponsors for it. But she never succeeded in gaining a foothold in the theater business again. In later years Hornimann joined the Quest Society of the theosophist George RS Mead .

Annie Horniman has received several awards for her theater work. In 1933 she received the " Order of the Companions of Honor ". She died on August 6, 1937 in Shere, Surrey.

Numerous theater critics and historians praised Annie Horniman "as a driving force in the design of 20th century English theater." George Bernard Shaw said of her: "The lady who really started the modern movement."

literature

• Ithell Colquhoun : Sword of Wisdom, MacGregor Mathers and the "Golden Dawn" . Kersken-Canbaz, Bergen 1996, ISBN 3-89423-030-4 .
• James W. Flannery: Miss Annie F. Horniman and the Abbey Theater . Dolmen Press 1970; Dufour Editions, Chester Springs, ISBN 0-19-647551-1
• Adrian Frazier: Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theater . University of California Press, 1990, ISBN 0-520-06549-2
• Sheila Gooddie: Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theater (Plays and Playwrights) . Eyre Methuen Drama, 1991, ISBN 0-413-17330-5
• Mary K. Greer: Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses . One Park Street, Rochester, Vermont, 1995, ISBN 0-89281-607-4

Web links

• Annie Horniman's papers ( Memento from February 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
• Biography ( Memento of February 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) in the London Metropolitan University (English)
• Women of the Golden Dawn (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Annie Horniman Biography. London Metropolitan University, accessed November 9, 2008 . 
2. ^ Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, archived from the original on January 31, 2009 ; Retrieved November 9, 2008 . 
3. ^ ^{A b} Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia: Annie Horniman. Retrieved November 9, 2008 . 
4. ^ Companions of Honor. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on September 26, 2008 ; Retrieved November 9, 2008 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ Annie Horniman. (No longer available online.) Theater Museum London, archived from the original January 8, 2005 ; Retrieved November 9, 2008 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.