Friday, 30 March 2012 : Brendan Behan

Our Spring production will be centered upon the works and sayings of Brendan Behan, with extracts from his two major plays The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. 

The Quare Fellow

The Quare Fellow's original title was The Twisting of Another Rope, in homage to Douglas Hyde’s play The Twisting of the Rope.  Douglas Hyde was a cultural activist and first President of Ireland.

Brendan Behan based The Quare Fellow on the hanging and the last few weeks of Bernard Kirwan’s life.  The murder was one of the most gruesome crimes of the time.  Kirwan and his brother had a fall out over a farm inherited from their mother.  The body of the brother was found dismembered in a bog a mile from the family farm.  Just before Kirwan went to the gallows, he balanced a cup of water on the back of his hand to show his executioners that he was not nervous.

The review by the well-known newspaper critic, Kenneth Tynan, sealed the play’s fate:

“The English hoard words like misers; the Irish spend them like sailors; and in Brendan Behan’s tremendous new play language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless and spoiling for a fight.  In itself, of course, this is scarcely amazing.  It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness.”

An Giall/The Hostage

The Hostage is a loose 1958 English version, with songs, adapted in a much longer text from a one-act Irish language Gaelic play An Giall by its author, Brendan Behan.  The poem Filleadh Mhic Eachaidh, written in 1946, was an eulogy for Sean McAughey, an IRA officer who died on a hunger strike in Portlaoise, was later incorporated into An Giall.

The play is set in a Dublin brothel owned by a fanatical Gael and run by a one-legged man.  A young British soldier is kidnapped from the Armagh barracks, brought to the brothel  and held hostage against the release of an IRA Volunteer who has been sentenced to death for shooting two policemen in Belfast.  Based on a real life incident which took place in Northern Ireland, the IRA found themselves with a hostage they did not want to kill and so released him.  Another source is the death of a young British officer during the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, he was captured by the Egyptians, bound and gagged and put in a closet where he suffocated.

A Roaring Broth of a Bhoy

Brendan Francis Behan was born in Dublin in 1923 and died at the age of 41.  He was a poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English.  He was also an Irish republican and a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army.

"Ah, bless you, Sister, may all your sons be bishops." 
(On his death bed, to the nun smoothing his pillow and wishing him God’s blessing)

At sixteen, Behan joined the IRA and embarked on an unauthorised solo mission to England to blow up the Liverpool docks. He was arrested and found in possession of explosives. Behan was sentenced to three years in a Borstal and did not return to Ireland until 1941.

"When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my
absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said
they could shoot me in my absence."

A modern Seanachaidhe.  This was Brendan Behan’s gift, the marvellously mobile features and exquisitely inflected voice conveying every nuance of the tale he is telling, so that you are no longer looking at a man relating a story but seeing pictures pass before the eye.

For more information, please call +33 493 41 97 22