Theater Fidele Horst e.V. 1919

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Theater Fidele Horst e.V. 1919

Founded	14 September 1919
Legal form	Registered association (eingetragener Verein)
Member of	Ama­teur­thea­ter­ver­band Nordrhein-Westfalen
Location
Headquarters	Herne
Country	Germany
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Links
Website	theater-fidele-horst.de
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The Theater Fidele Horst e. V. 1919 is an amateur theatre association in Herne in the Ruhr, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Founded in 1919 in the Holsterhausen district as a young men's social club, it has staged comedies and farces for more than a century, in recent decades mainly at the Mondpalast in Wanne-Eickel. Its motto is Lachen machen ("making people laugh").

History

1919 to 1945

The Gesellschaftsclub Fidele Horst was founded on 14 September 1919 by a group of young bachelors aged 18 to 20 at the Kraft inn in the Horststraße, in an area known as op de Horst. Its purpose was sociability, expressed in the club greeting Immer fidel, with weekly gatherings, outings and theatre contests with neighbouring clubs. Its first stage appearance, on 14 March 1920, was the humorous trio Onkel Hähnchen, followed that year by a song play and a drama. A singing section was added in 1925, and in the 1930s the club had 70 active members.

On 4 December 1932 the club was renamed Theaterverein Fidele Horst. In August 1933 it was brought into line under the Nazi regime (Gleichschaltung); its chairman became a Vereinsführer, and in 1937 it had to change its name to Volksspiel-Gruppe Holsterhausen. Its last performance before the war, the farce Die drei Zwillinge, took place on 24 September 1939.

After 1947

The club resumed in 1947, but as no hall was available in Holsterhausen it played first at the Sassenhof in Crange and then until 1950 in Wanne. After a short return to the Kraft hall, which became a cinema in 1955, it performed from 1956 at the Saalbau in Wanne and later also at the Herne Kulturzentrum. In the 1970s it sometimes staged two plays a year. After the Saalbau burned down on 18 August 1981, the club moved to the Kulturzentrum for two years until the building was rebuilt.

From the mid-1980s into the 2000s the club recorded rising audiences. Its record was the comedy Einmal Bali und zurück in 2005, with six sold-out performances at the Saalbau, renamed Mondpalast in 2003, and four more at the Kulturzentrum, for about 5,500 spectators in total. It also gave guest performances in Castrop-Rauxel and Wattenscheid. Since 4 March 2001 the club has had its own clubhouse, a former mill in the Königsstraße, which members renovated and use for rehearsals and storage.

In 2012 the club paused for internal reasons, and on 30 October 2012 the members voted on whether to dissolve it; the vote was clearly in favour of continuing. It restarted in 2013 with Ein ganz spezieller Mord. It has since used sign-language interpreters at some performances to make them accessible to deaf audiences. In its centenary year, 2019, it staged Die spanische Fliege. There were no productions in 2020 and 2021.

Repertoire

According to the club, it helped establish the Ruhr dialect comedy with plays such as Familie Schippanowsky, and it has also staged boulevard comedies by Ray Cooney, Dave Freeman and Marc Camoletti. Recent productions include Jack Popplewell's crime comedy Keine Leiche ohne Lily (2024) and Michael Cooney's farce Und ewig rauschen die Gelder (2025). In April 2027 it is staging Jens Exler's comedy Tratsch im Treppenhaus, first performed at Hamburg's Ohnsorg Theater in 1962, at the Mondpalast, with one performance interpreted into sign language.