The Riot in Westport: George A. Birmingham at Home

On Wednesday, February 4, 1914, the performance of George A. Birmingham's General John Regan, in Westport, County Mayo, punctuated by catcalls throughout the first act, was stopped during the second act when angry protesters stormed the stage. Members of the audience who were not part of the planned action, triggered by the cry "Now boys!," fled the theater. Although alerted to the likelihood of trouble by posters calling for the protest, the police were unable to restore order in the theater to allow the performance to continue. Chairs were hurled, stage properties and scenery destroyed, the theater itself badly damaged. The actor playing the Catholic parish priest was the focus of the attack. Rioters ripped off his Roman collar and, after leaving the theater, burned it in the Octagon (Westport's town center). Police accounts report that the crowd had swelled to 700. The windows of the box office, theater, and hotel accommodating the actors were broken. In the course of what the police called a riot, a constable was badly injured and five baton charges were made against the crowd. The riot was quelled only after the intervention of the parish priest, Father Canavan, who pleaded for order. Twenty young men described as students were arrested.

This now obscure incident in Irish stage history was anomalous in that it occurred not in Dublin but in Westport; yet in other respects it was entirely characteristic of the disorders associated with stage protests in Ireland throughout the twentieth century. It was not a spontaneous, but an orchestrated demonstration. It presumed the audience's right to express its displeasure by interrupting a performance. The protest was rooted in publicity that the play had received in the press and triggered its own sustained press coverage, although not on a scale to rival that of ThePlayboy of the Western World in 1907 or The Plough and the Stars in 1926. The Westport riot, like other riots, directed its violence against the actors in a confrontation that pitted Catholic demonstrators against a Protestant playwright. The riot over Birmingham's General John Regan was the most violent Irish theatrical confrontation of the century and raised many of the same questions about an audience's prerogatives as well as the play's realism, sources, and politics that arose in regard to both ThePlayboy and The Plough and the Stars.

In 1914, George A. Birmingham, the pen name of Canon James Owen Hannay, was at the peak of his popularity. Forty-nine years old at the time, Hannay served as rector for the Church of Ireland in Westport between 1892 and 1913. As George A. Birmingham, he wrote some fifty comic novels, most of them set in Ireland. A native of Belfast and second-generation Church of Ireland clergyman, Hannay was a strong advocate of Home Rule and numbered among his friends Horace Plunkett, Arthur Griffith, Standish O'Grady, and Douglas Hyde, with whom he shared the growing cultural nationalism of the times. Once a member of the Gaelic League, he also authored a pamphlet titled Is the Gaelic League Political? Hannay enjoyed a favorable public opinion and, the further he got from Westport, the more favorable that opinion grew. Newspaper accounts of his lectures typically describe him as "genial" and "delightful," an author known for "his warmth and wit." Hannay's affable public image contributed to the popularity of his many novels and to his popularity as a lecturer, especially outside of Ireland. Hannay was wont to speak of Birmingham in the third person, as in "I have a great deal of respect for George A. Birmingham because I think he is a serious sort of chap trying to make an honest penny and maintaining an attitude of fair consideration and regard for his neighbour." ¹

Birmingham's career as a playwright dates from 1911 when he wrote Eleanor's Enterprise, a play that was rejected first by the Abbeyand then by...