5

If Horniman's attempts to achieve self-expression as costume designer and impresario ended in failure, there were other

[54] Horniman gave in, a little resentfully, to Sarsfield's pressure to advertise the theatre at least partly among the Irish in England. She went so far as to arrange to place an article in the Catholic Herald ; indeed, "to please your blessed countrymen," she says, "I'm managing for a portrait of Kathleen ni Houlihan to go into that paper." This, she concludes, "will 'fetch' the 1/- public." The sixpenny public, even the one shilling (1/-) people, were a very precise consumption community: the Catholic nationalist Irish. Raising prices was Horniman's way of getting rid of them. Horniman to WBY, 18 April 1906.

[55] Horniman to WBY, 18 April 1906.

avenues to take in trying to make her mark on Irish theatre. Her original decisions as owner of the Abbey had a permanent effect on the formation of its audience, and the attitude the audience assumed toward the works staged there. The reconstruction of the Mechanics' Institute under the supervision of Joseph Holloway, at a cost of £1,300, turned it from a common playhouse to a small, but glamorously appointed, theatre.^[56] On opening night, 31 December 1904, its ideal patrons would arrive by carriage on Marlborough Street, enter the separate entrance installed for those with expensive seats, shed their wraps at their private cloakroom, come up the stairs into the vestibule before the play, admire John Butler Yeats's portraits of the Fays, Maire nic Shiublaigh, and Horniman herself, take in the Celtic Art Deco of Sarah Purser's three-window, stained-glass design of a tree in leaf, and then pass down into their stalls for Yeats's verse-tragedy, On Baile's Strand .^[57] The more common visitor to the Abbey would take a tram to the O'Connell Street Terminus, walk down a block on Abbey Street to the entrance of the theatre, step in to stare in wonder at "the complete and beautiful arrangements" inside, nervously check out the pit, only to learn that no gate had been installed to set off sixpenny seats, would then inquire at the box office, and, if he could afford the price of a shilling ticket, would pass into the theatre to enjoy Lady Gregory's Spreading the News , the curtain-raiser, before sitting through the splendors of Yeats's blank verse. Because of the ways in which Horniman employed her money (with Holloway, J. B. Yeats, and Purser), the Abbey made the rich feel at home, and the poor—on a first visit—out of place. The Abbey was a lovely little theatre, built and decorated by Irish hands with Irish materials, but its appointments made clear it was intended as a house of gentility—with a door for aristocrats, another door for the middle class, and no seats for the poor. Quite obviously it was not erected to be a factory of revolution.

[56] Hugh Hunt, The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre, 1904–1978 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 58–59.

[57] See John Masefield's review of the Abbey Theatre opening in the Manchester Guardian , and the very different review in the Irish Daily and Independent , quoted in part by Gerard Fay (Abbey Theatre , 92–93).

Horniman's rule against sixpenny seats—declared in her formal offer of the Abbey to the Irish National Theatre Society—caused "great and ever-growing indignation."^[58] Maud Gonne wrote a personal note to Yeats, saying he was "lost to nationalism," and in the United Irishman Arthur Griffith publicly called the price "undemocratic" and "unpatriotic." It would be wrong to treat the flare-up over ticket prices as mere nationalist hysteria, as if a sixpenny coin were nothing. The wages of workingmen in Dublin were miserable: investigatory commissions suggested that twenty-two shillings a week were required to maintain "merely physical efficiency," but general workers with regular employment made from twenty to twenty-five shillings, casual laborers made from twelve to fifteen, and, in the fall of 1905, some members of the INTS, Ltd. cast were offered only ten to fifteen shillings a week.^[59] Other economic conditions exacerbated the problem of low wages: infant mortality was the worst in the British Isles, 20 percent of the workers were unemployed, 30 percent of the population lived in slums and often could not keep up with the rents there.^[60] Yet these wage earners were the backbone of the Gaelic League, political clubs, and theatre groups. Effectively, the Abbey was asking of nationalists a half-day's wages for a night's entertainment, when a day's wages barely met, if at all, the needs of food and shelter. Furthermore, there was a national tradition, going back to Daniel O'Connell's "Catholic Rent," that made a small subscription the ticket to full participation in a political movement.^[61] Making the most off some was sacrificed to making a little from all, thereby achieving solidarity and popularity for movements. According to D. P. Moran of the Leader , Abbey prices placed "the Theatre outside the sphere of utility of the Gaelic League," a remark that

[58] WBY to Lady Gregory, 24 November 1904; Wade, 445.

[59] See Joseph V. O'Brien, "Dear, Dirty Dublin": A City in Distress, 1899–1916 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 199–240; esp. 203.

[60] F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (1971; rev. ed., London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 275–76.

[61] J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923 (London: Faber & Faber, 1969; 1966), 299–300.

must have given ironic satisfaction to both Yeats and Horniman, since they had always resented the assumption that the dramatic movement was to be a branch office run out of nationalist headquarters. The political groups, Yeats observed, "had all got to look upon the Hall as their property," but now they would learn that Horniman's purchase of the Abbey disappropriated them; the new ticket prices were their notice of eviction.^[62]

So great was Horniman's desire to regulate the character of the audience at the Abbey that she not only doubled the normal price of a ticket for the pit, she wanted to give away free tickets for the stalls to "respectable" people. After the split in the acting company, Horniman proposed employing a Mrs. Higgenbottom or a Miss Taylor (representative citizens of English Ireland) to "paper the theatre." She wanted the "class of people" who found Irish nationalism abhorrent to "see for themselves" "that the shows are [not] overpolitical."^[63] Lady Gregory, who knew her Ireland, nixed the plan: not even complimentary tickets would draw the Castle crowd, and a desperate play for their favor would kill the theatre for its natural audience.^[64]

[62] In the fall of 1906, Lady Gregory, who "was always against a 1/- pit," prevailed upon Yeats and Horniman to permit the sale of sixpenny seats (announced in The Arrow , no. 1, 20 October 1906), although the theatre owner continued to worry that this would "cheapen the house" and lead to "untoward behavior" on the part of nationalists. She sent the bill for the installation of a gate dividing the pit into shilling & sixpenny sections to the directors. When Maud Gonne's Cumann na nGaedhal rented the Abbey and also sold sixpenny seats, Horniman found out and banned them from further use of the theatre, since tenants were ordered to abide by the old rule of a 1/- pit. The National Theatre Society might profit from the new prices (and it did), but she was not going to let an expressly political organization take advantage of them for popular patriotic entertainments. See Lady Gregory to Colum, enclosure in Lady Gregory to Synge, 9 January 1906; Horniman to Darragh, 18 August 1906; Horniman to WBY, 24 June 1906; and Horniman to Holloway, 28 February 1907.

[63] Horniman to WBY, 22 July 1906; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:163.

[64] In the long run, as Yeats noted in 1908, the Abbey had "nothing but the pit": "the stalls won't come near us, except when some titled person or other comes and brings guests. All the praise we have had from the mostintellectual critics cannot bring the Irish educated classes, and all the abuse we have had from the least intellectual cannot keep the less educated away" (WBY to Quinn, [October] 1908; Wade, 512).