![]() ![]() ![]() And Theatre Workshop had an even bigger hit in 1958 with The Hostage, in which Behan tackled his Republican past head on - although this time the writer-director relationship was not as cordial. Good on yer!' And the play was safely launched, sold out." The Quare Fellow transferred to the Comedy Theatre for a six-month run, followed by a tour. The next day, she recalled, "every bus or taxi that passed us slowed down to shout 'Hi, Brendan! You was properly pissed on TV last night. Interviewed on BBC television by Malcolm Muggeridge the day after the press show, Behan was so drunk that Littlewood had to crouch behind his seat on the studio floor to keep him upright. you never stopped laughing."īehan came over to England for Littlewood's Theatre Workshop production, which opened in May 1956 - just two months after the House of Lords had over-ruled Parliament's attempt to abolish the death penalty (it would remain on the statute until 1969). The typing frequently went careering off the page, there were beer stains and repetitions, but you'd hardly read five pages before you recognised a great entertainer. In her memoirs, she recalled receiving "a tattered bundle. With Simpson's plans stalling, an impatient Behan sent the play to Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. "A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the play is going to be IRA-based and political, but it isn't. "It's a real documentation of prison life as Behan had lived it," says Burke, whose Irish-born father, Paddy, introduced her to Behan's writing when she was a teenager. Set in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison and closely based on Behan's stint there in the 1940s for attempted murder, it stands as the theatrical definition of gallows humour: a consistently, sometimes outrageously funny and sobering portrait of the 24 hours leading up to the hanging of the "quare fellow" (Irish jail slang for a condemned man), who has murdered his brother. Now Oxford Stage Company and director Kathy Burke are rescuing Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow from decades of neglect. It was first produced in 1954 but hasn't been staged in London since 1956. Not only is it the last instalment of a unique and unorthodox autobiography, but of a unique and unorthodox life that was as touched with genius as it was with doom.In Changing Stages, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright's acclaimed survey of 20th-century theatre, it was called "an overwhelming indictment of capital punishment without a hint of piety or sentimentality: a beautiful play, unjustly forgotten". I was free.įirst published after Brendan Behan's tragic death, Confessions of an Irish Rebel picks up where Borstal Boy left off. There are no words and it would be impertinence to try. 'Cead mile failte romhat abhaile.' (A hundred thousand welcomes home to you.) I could not answer. The immigration officer shook my hand and his hard face softened. ![]() ![]() 'Apparently he is Brendan Behan,' they said. Two detectives came forward who were evidently there to meet me. 'No' I said 'as a matter of fact, I'm Yemenite Arab.' The immigration man read my deportation order, looked at it and handed it back to me. Continuing the longstanding tradition of political Irish literature, propagated by James Joyce and Sean O'Casey, this is the true story of life in the IRA. A posthumously published autobiography from the famous, even infamous, Irish playwright and author of Borstal Boy. ![]()
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