Brendan Behan - Bio, Facts, Family | Famous Birthdays Brendan Behan Author Born In Ireland#31 About Talented Irish poet and playwright who died of alcoholism. He wrote The Quare Fellow, The Hostage, and Borstal Boy. The Quare Fellow - latimes YOU ARE HERE: LAT Home → Collections The Quare Fellow The Life and Times of Brendan Behan, Dublin's Most Famous Forgotten Son April 07, 2002 |CLANCY SIGAL | Clancy Sigal is the author of "Going Away" and "The Secret Defector" and is a screenwriter. Brendan Behan, the bad boy of modern Irish letters, was good copy. Journalists like myself fed off him, fed him drinks and then fed him to our editors. At our (and his) worst, we led him around like a trained bear, into the pubs that were killing him and onto transatlantic TV talk shows where, on cue, he performed as the outrageous drunken "paddy" who could write his fool head off in private and in public make a fall-down sloppy buffoon of himself.

At the peak of his popularity, in the early 1960s, he gave audiences a caricature of an Irishman, free with his sex and curses, and a prodigy with the English language. Like the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, he lived down to our expectations everywhere except at the writing table. Brendan Behan was a serious literary craftsman on a near-equal footing with his contemporary (and mentor) Samuel Beckett. In his best-known plays, "The Quare Fellow" and "The Hostage"--both originally written in Gaelic--he was an Irish Brecht in his inventive use of music, song and irony. He wrote one of the finest of all prison memoirs, the touching and forceful "Borstal Boy," now a film by Peter Sheridan. His wickedly funny crime novel, "The Scarperer," is as good as anything by Frank or Malachy McCourt. And his short stories, collected in "Hold Your Hour and Have Another" and "After the Wake," are first rate.

FOR THE RECORD Los Angeles Times Saturday April 13, 2002 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 A2 Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction Essay--In the essay "The Quare Fellow: The Life and Times of Brendan Behan, Dublin's Most Famous Forgotten Son,"(Book Review, April 7), the name of the bar Davy Byrne's was misspelled. Also, the bar is on Duke Street, not Pearl Street. For the Record Los Angeles Times Sunday April 14, 2002 Bulldog Edition Main News Part A Page 2 Advance Desk 1 inches; 35 words Type of Material: Correction "The Quare Fellow"--In the April 7 Book Review, the essay "The Quare Fellow: The Life and Times of Brendan Behan, Dublin's Most Famous Forgotten Son" misspelled the name of the bar Davy Byrne's. Also, the bar is located on Duke Street, not Pearl Street.

For the Record Los Angeles Times Sunday April 14, 2002 Bulldog Edition Main News Part A Page 2 Advance Desk 1 inches; 35 words Type of Material: Correction "The Quare Fellow"--In the April 7 Book Review, the essay "The Quare Fellow: The Life and Times of Brendan Behan, Dublin's Most Famous Forgotten Son" misspelled the name of the bar Davy Byrne's. Also, the bar is located on Duke Street, not Pearl Street. For the Record Los Angeles Times Sunday April 21, 2002 Home Edition Book Review Page 18 Book Review Desk 1 inches; 32 words Type of Material: Correction In the essay "The Quare Fellow: The Life and Times of Brendan Behan, Dublin's Most Famous Forgotten Son," (Book Review, April 7), the name of the bar Davy Byrne's was misspelled. Also, the bar is on Duke Street, not Pearl Street. As an IRA terrorist, Behan had blown up things and tried to kill people. The son of a politically conscious Dublin house painter, he was an IRA message carrier by 9.

At 13 he was arrested on a sabotage mission, attempting to blow up a battleship in Liverpool harbor, and sentenced to three years in Borstal, an English reform school, the period covered in Sheridan's film. Later, he was sent to an adult prison, the notorious Mountjoy, and served another jail term for helping an IRA prisoner to escape. What great copy! In 1962 my editor, David Astor, publisher of the liberal Sunday newspaper the Observer, sent me to Ireland on a double mission: to cajole Behan into entering detox in England (to be paid for by Astor), or, if that failed, to catch for posterity his dying words. The week I spent with him in Dublin, at his Ballsbridge home and making the lethal rounds at Jury's, Bailey's, the Dolphin, Davy Burns--up and down the bars of Pearl Street--was brutally alcoholic, phantasmagoric and, for me, unforgettable. Everyone, including Behan, knew he was dying--of diabetes and liver and life itself--and some were impatient that he was taking such a God almighty long time at it. He wasn't 40 yet.

Huge, sprawling, disheveled, a large cigarette burn squarely in the back of his new Irish-export tweed suit, his white shirt streaked with dirt and spotted with faded bloodstains down the front, the tops of his suspendered trousers reaching almost to the barrel-like chest, his yellowish drink-splotched face showing several days' growth of rough reddened beard, he looked the very stereotype of burned-out roaring boy from the heart of working-class Dublin. Wherever we went in Dublin, him wheezing and coughing and spitting blood into a handkerchief, he seemed to know everybody. Old school friends, booze-up pals, IRA comrades, hangers-on, admirers and ex-lovers surrounded him on every street, in every pub, feeding him whiskey, bits of sly gossip, slyer malice, thumps on the back and ... always--always--more Jameson's whiskey. Once, when I suggested to him that perhaps his friends were easing his passage to the grave prematurely, he turned his sad behemoth's shattered gaze on me and said, "It's obvious you're not Irish despite your name.

All this"--he waved his hand at the pub mob around us waiting for him to crumple or fight or do something wicked--"it's a form of mercy, don't you see?" Then the surprises came. As the drink seeped into him, and I thought he'd probably die in my arms, he became something more than a self-destructive clown. Death staring him in the face didn't exactly sober him. What could? (I actually attended, in his Ballsbridge bedroom, Behan's wake for himself where he sadly greeted the mourners filing in to pay their respects.) But, temporarily relieved of the duty of playing a "local character," of dying so publicly, he revealed a gentler, more vulnerable man who had "gone beyond," into a melancholy, meditative place. He was, I believe, first and foremost a political poet. But now, near the end, he was transcending his own history. At the core of his large and difficult heart, he'd gone from being a man of war, reprisal and revenge to being a man of peace and reconciliation and no quick answers. I've rarely seen this except in veteran combat soldiers--or political operatives--who evolve into something like conscientious objection to violence.

Brendan Behan - 必应 Sign in Brendan Behan Brendan Francis Aidan Behan (christened Francis Behan) (/ˈbiːən/ BEE-ən; Irish: Breandán Ó Beacháin; 9 February 1923 – 20 March 1964) was an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both English and Irish. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Irish writers of all time. He was also an Irish republican and a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army. Born in Dublin into a republican family, he became a member of the IRA's youth organisation Fianna Éireann at the age of fourteen. However, there was also a strong emph ... (展开) asis on Irish history and culture in the home, which meant he was steeped in literature and patriotic ballads from an early age. Behan eventually joined the IRA at sixteen, which led to his serving time in a borstal youth prison in the United Kingdom and he was also imprisoned in Republic of Ireland. During this time, he took it upon himself to study and he became a fluent speaker of the Irish language.

Subsequently released from prison as part of a general amnesty given by the Fianna Fáil government in 1946, Behan moved between homes in Dublin, Kerry and Connemara, and also resided in Paris for a time. In 1954, Behan's first play The Quare Fellow, was produced in Dublin. It was well received; however, it was the 1956 production at Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in Stratford, London, that gained Behan a wider reputation. This was helped by a famous drunken interview on BBC television. In 1958, Behan's play in the Irish language An Giall had its debut at Dublin's Damer Theatre. Later, The Hostage, Behan's English-language adaptation of An Giall, met with great success internationally. Behan's autobiographical novel, Borstal Boy, was published the same year and became a worldwide best-seller. He married Beatrice Ffrench-Salkeld in 1955. Behan was known for his drinking problem, which resulted in his suffering from diabetes, which ultimately resulted in his death on 20 March 1964.

He was given an IRA guard of honour, which escorted his coffin. It was described by several newspapers as the biggest funeral since those of Michael Collins and Charles Stewart Parnell. brendan behan是谁 答 阳历2月9日 水瓶座 水瓶座亦名宝瓶座 Aquarius 1月20日－2月19日 守护星：天王星 (象征智慧及变数) 传统守护星：土星(象征考验及规则） 诞生石：紫水晶 属性：风相星座 吉祥物：竖琴螺 吉祥金属：铂或镭 吉祥数字：4、13、22、31 吉祥日：星期三 掌管宫位：第十一宫 守护神：乌拉诺斯 雅典娜 正面特质：独立 冷静 神秘 特质：冷酷 不合群 孤僻 ... Early life Behan was born in the inner city of Dublin at Holles Street Hospital on 9 February 1923 into an educated working-class family.

He lived in a house on Russell Street near Mountjoy Square owned by his grandmother, Christine English, who owned a number of properties in the area. Brendan's father Stephen Behan, a house painter who had been active in the Irish War of Independence, read classic literature to the children at bedtime from sources such as Zola, Galsworthy, and Maupassant; his mother, Kathleen, took them on literary tours of the city. If Behan's interest in literature came from his father, his political beliefs came from his mother. She remained politically active all her life and was a personal friend of the Irish republican Michael Collins. Brendan Behan wrote a lament to Collins, "The Laughing Boy", at the age of thirteen. The title was from the affectionate nickname Mrs. Behan gave to Collins. Kathleen published her autobiography, "Mother of All The Behans", a collaboration with her son Brian, in 1984. Behan's uncle Peadar Kearney wrote the Irish national anthem "The Soldier's Song".

His brother, Dominic Behan, was also a renowned songwriter best known for the song "The Patriot Game"; another sibling, Brian Behan, was a prominent radical political activist and public speaker, actor, author, and playwright.[citation needed] Following Brendan's death, his widow had a child with Cathal Goulding called Paudge Behan; the two men were described as "good friends". A biographer, Ulick O'Connor, recounts that one day, at age eight, Brendan was returning home with his granny and a crony from a drinking session. A passer-by remarked, "Oh, my! Isn't it terrible ma'am to see such a beautiful child deformed?" "How dare you," said his granny. "He's not deformed, he's just drunk!\ Behan left school at 13 to follow in his father's footsteps as a house painter. Republican activities In 1937, the family moved to a new local council housing scheme in Crumlin. Behan became a member of Fianna Éireann, the youth organisation of the IRA. He published his first poems and prose in the organisation's magazine, Fianna: the Voice of Young Ireland.

In 1931 he also became the youngest contributor to be published in the Irish Press with his poem "Reply of Young Boy to Pro-English verses". 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 (once under the care of Cyril Joyce) and did not return to Ireland until 1941. He wrote about these years in his autobiography, Borstal Boy. In 1942, during the timeframe leading to the IRA's Northern Campaign, Behan was tried for the attempted murder of two Detectives of the Garda Siochana. The assassinations were to take place in Dublin at a commemoration ceremony for Wolfe Tone, the father of Irish Republicanism. Sentenced to fourteen years in prison, Behan was incarcerated in Mountjoy Prison and the Curragh Camp. These experiences were recalled in "Confessions of an Irish Rebel." Released under a general amnesty for IRA prisoners and internees in 1946, his activist career was over by the age of twenty-three.

Aside from a short prison sentence he received in 1947 for his part in trying to break a fellow IRA member out of a Manchester jail, he effectively left the IRA, though he remained great friends with Cathal Goulding. Behan the writer Behan's prison experiences were central to his future writing career. In Mountjoy he wrote his first play, The Landlady, and also began to write short stories and other prose. It was a literary magazine called Envoy (A Review of Literature and Art), founded by John Ryan, that first published Behan's short stories and his first poem. Some of his early work was also published in The Bell, the leading Irish literary magazine of the time. He also learned Irish in prison and, after his release in 1946, he spent some time in the Gaeltacht areas of Galway and Kerry, where he started writing poetry in Irish. He left Ireland and all its perceived social pressures to live in Paris in the early 1950s. There he felt he could lose himself and release the artist within. Although he still drank heavily, he managed to earn a living, supposedly by writing pornography.

By the time he returned to Ireland, he had become a writer who drank too much, rather than a drinker who talked about what he was going to write. He had also developed the knowledge that to succeed, he would have to discipline himself. Throughout the rest of his writing career, he would rise at seven in the morning and work until noon—when the pubs opened. He began to write for various newspapers, such as The Irish Times, and also for radio, which broadcast a play of his entitled "The Leaving Party". Additionally, he cultivated a reputation as carouser-in-chief and swayed shoulder-to-shoulder with other literati of the day that he had got to know through Envoy and who used the pub, McDaid's, as their base: Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Swift, Anthony Cronin, J. P. Donleavy and artist Desmond MacNamara whose bust of Behan is on display at the National Writers Museum. For unknown reasons Behan had a major falling-out with Kavanagh, who reportedly would visibly shudder at the mention of Behan's name and who referred to Behan as "evil incarnate".

Behan's fortunes changed in 1954 with the appearance of his play The Quare Fellow—his major breakthrough at last. Originally called The Twisting of Another Rope and influenced by his time spent in jail, it chronicles the vicissitudes of prison life leading up to the execution of "the quare fellow"—a character who is never seen. The prison dialogue is vivid and laced with satire, but reveals to the reader the human detritus that surrounds capital punishment. It was produced in the Pike Theatre in Dublin. The play ran for six months. In May 1956, The Quare Fellow opened in the Theatre Royal Stratford East, in a production by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. Subsequently it transferred to the West End. Behan generated immense publicity for The Quare Fellow as a result of a drunken appearance on the Malcolm Muggeridge TV show. The English, relatively unaccustomed to public drunkenness in authors, took him to their hearts. A fellow guest on the show, Irish-American actor Jackie Gleason, reportedly said about the incident: "It wasn't an act of God, but an act of Guinness!" Behan and Gleason went on to forge a friendship.

Behan loved the story of how, walking along the street in London shortly after this episode, a Cockney approached him and exclaimed that he understood every word he had said—drunk or not—but had not a clue what "that bugger Muggeridge was on about!" While addled, Brendan would clamber on stage and recite the play's signature song "The Auld Triangle". The transfer of the play to Broadway provided Behan with international recognition. Rumours still abound that Littlewood contributed much of the text of The Quare Fellow and led to the saying, "Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood, Brendan Behan wrote under Littlewood". She remained a supporter, visiting him in Dublin in 1960. In 1957, his Irish language play, An Giall (The Hostage) opened in the Damer Theatre, Dublin. Reminiscent of Frank O'Connor's Guests of the Nation, it portrays the detention, in a teeming Dublin house in the late 1950s, of a British conscript soldier seized by the IRA as a hostage pending the scheduled execution in Northern Ireland of an imprisoned IRA volunteer.

The hostage falls in love with an Irish convent girl, Teresa, working as a maid in the house. Their innocent world of love is incongruous among their surroundings—the house also serves as a brothel. In the end, the hostage dies accidentally during a bungled police raid, revealing the human cost of war—a universal suffering. The subsequent English-language version The Hostage (1958), reflecting Behan's own translation from the Irish, but also much influenced by Joan Littlewood during a troubled collaboration with Behan, is a bawdy, slapstick play that adds a number of flamboyantly gay characters and bears only a limited resemblance to the original Irish language version. His autobiographical novel Borstal Boy followed in 1958. In this vivid memoir of his time in St Andrews House, Hollesley Bay Colony Borstal near Woodbridge, Suffolk, England. ( The site of St Andrews House is now a Category D men's prison and Young Offenders Institution. ) An original voice in Irish literature boomed out from its pages. The language is both acerbic and delicate, the portrayal of inmates and "screws" cerebral.

For a Republican, though, it is not a vitriolic attack on Britain; it delineates Behan's move away from violence. In one account an inmate strives to entice Behan in chanting political slogans with him. Behan curses and damns him in his mind, hoping he would cease his rantings-hardly the sign of a troublesome prisoner. By the end the idealistic boy rebel emerges as a realistic young man who recognises the truth: violence, especially political violence, is futile. Kenneth Tynan, the 1950s literary critic said: "While other writers hoard words like misers, Behan sends them out on a spree, ribald, flushed, and spoiling for a fight." He was now established as one of the leading Irish writers of his generation. He learned to speak Irish at the home of the Nolan family in the Gaeltacht area of Galway in the late 1940s. Drs Sinead and Maureen Nolan (daughters of the house) never heard a disrespectful word or a hint of obscenity from him during that time. He was much loved and revered by their deeply religious parents, who recognized his genius for language early.

They saw his theatrics for what it was: a device to conceal an exquisitely sensitive nature.[citation needed] Brendan Behan In popular culture Behan is frequently mentioned in works of popular culture. His work has been a significant influence in the writings of Shane MacGowan, and he is the subject of "Streams of Whiskey", a song by The Pogues. Behan's version of the third verse of "The Internationale", from Borstal Boy, was reproduced on the LP sleeve of Dexys Midnight Runners's debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels. Chicago-based band The Tossers wrote the song "Breandan O Beachain", found on their 2008 album On A Fine Spring Evening. Shortly after Behan's death a young student, Fred Geis, wrote the song "Lament for Brendan Behan" and passed it on to the Clancy Brothers, who sang it on their album Recorded Live in Ireland the same year. This song, which calls "bold Brendan" Ireland's "sweet angry singer", was later covered by the Australian trio The Doug Anthony All Stars, better known as a comedy band, on their album Blue.

"Brendan" is Seamus Robinson's song-tribute to Behan. Behan's prisoner song "The Auld Triangle", (which featured in his play The Quare Fellow—this term being prison slang for a prisoner condemned to be hanged), has become something of a standard and has been recorded on numerous occasions, by folk musicians as well as popular bands such as The Pogues, the Dropkick Murphys and The Doug Anthony All Stars. Behan's two poems from his work The Hostage, "On the eighteenth day of November" and "The laughing boy" have been translated into Swedish and recorded by Ann Sofi Nilsson on the album När kommer dagen. The same poems have been translated in 1966 to Greek and recorded by Maria Farantouri on the album "Ένας όμηρος" ( the hostage) by Mikis Theodorakis . A pub named for Behan is located in the historically Irish Jamaica Plain section of Boston, Massachusetts. A bronze sculpture of the writer stands outside the Palace Bar on Dublin's Fleet Street. According to J.P. Donleavy's History of The Ginger Man, Behan was instrumental in bringing Donleavy in contact with M.

Girodios of Olympia Press (Paris) to help Donleavy's famous first novel, The Ginger Man be published despite its having been ostracised by the world literature community for its "filth" and "obscenity". In May 2011, Brendan at the Chelsea, written by Behan's niece, Janet Behan, was the first play performed in the Naughton Studio at the new Lyric Theatre in Belfast. The production tells the story of Behan's residence at New York's Hotel Chelsea in 1963. It was a critical success and is being revived for a tour to Theatre Row in New York in September 2013 before returning to the Lyric in October 2013. In Morrissey's 2014 song "Mountjoy," he references, "Brendan Behan's laughter rings / For what he had or hadn’t done / For he knew then as I know now / That for each and every one of us / We all lose / Rich or poor, / We all lose / Rich or poor, they all lose".

^ Brendan Behan: A Life, Michael O'Sullivan, pg 23 ^ Brendan Behan: A Life, Michael O'Sullivan, pg xi ^ "From James Joyce to Oscar Wilde, top ten Irish novelists in history". IrishCentral.com. Retrieved 2015-10-27. ^ a b c d e Joan Littlewood, ‘Behan, (Francis) Brendan (1923–1964)’, Brendan Behan. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on line ed., Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 14 June 2014 (subscription or UK public library membership required) ^ Patriot Game, lyrics. Brobdingnagian Bards. Retrieved 14 June 2014 ^ Ed Moloney (2003). A Secret History of the IRA. Penguin. p.51. ^ O'Sullivan, Michael. "Brendan Behan: A Life". Google Search. pp.61–68. Retrieved 14 August 2014.

^ A tribute to The Lost People of Arlington House, The National Archives, London 2004 ^ Cavendish, Dominic (31 January 2008). "Brendan at the Chelsea: less large than life". The Daily Telegraph. It hints at Behan's bisexuality without getting explicit and never paints him, as Patrick Kavanaugh (sic) once described him, as "evil incarnate". ^ "Irish Times" archives, 4 August 1960. ^ Nihill, Cian. "Palace of inspiration: Sculptures of writers unveiled", The Irish Times, 6 October 2011. ^ "Mountjoy Lyrics". Metrolyrics.com. Retrieved 30 July 2014. ^ Kirkpatrick, Marion. "Morrissey's 'World Peace is None of Your Business': What the Critics are Saying". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 30 July 2014. Borstal boy | The Independent Features Borstal boy Brendan Behan was a hard-drinking criminal who died at 41. He also wrote 'The Quare Fellow', a satire on capital punishment that created a sensation in 1956.

Now Kathy Burke is staging a revival, says Daniel Rosenthal. Can lightning strike twice? Sunday 1 February 2004 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture 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". It was first produced in 1954 but hasn't been staged in London since 1956. Now Oxford Stage Company and director Kathy Burke are rescuing Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow from decades of neglect. 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.

"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. "A lot of people [who know of Behan's Republican past] make the mistake of thinking the play is going to be IRA-based and political, but it isn't. It's just extraordinarily humane." At the time, it was also extraordinarily pertinent. For The Quare Fellow's original audiences, judicial hanging was a vivid reality, not part of history. Murderer Michael Manning, the last man to be hanged in Ireland, died in April 1954; seven months later, The Quare Fellow, which had been rejected by the Abbey and Gate theatres, was produced at the Pike Theatre Club, one of the first of Dublin's "fringe" venues.

Its co-founders, Carolyn Swift and Alan Simpson, directed the play and employed what Simpson would later call "a little patient bullying" to persuade Behan to make "the necessary alterations" to the script and abandon his original title, The Twisting of Another Rope - not because it was inappropriately emotive for a play devoid of polemic, but to save money on newspaper advertisements that charged by the line. "The production was greeted mainly with critical acclaim," recalled Simpson, who went on to run the Abbey and died in 1980, "but as the cast was large and the accommodation small [only 50 seats] we could only afford to run for four weeks." His attempts to arrange a new production at a larger Dublin venue foundered, partly because of "political and social prejudices against Behan", who had joined a Republican youth movement aged nine, been sent to borstal for attempted sabotage in England at 16 and then, in 1942, been jailed for 14 years (subsequently commuted) for the attempted murder of a Special Branch detective. With Simpson's plans stalling, an impatient Behan sent the play to Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

In her memoirs, she recalled receiving "a tattered bundle ... 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 ... you never stopped laughing." Behan 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). 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. 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. 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.

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. "When Littlewood did The Quare Fellow she devised fantastic working methods to achieve Behan's writing," says Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Oxford Stage Company. "With The Hostage she put songs and music hall routines into it and ruined it. After The Quare Fellow Behan said, 'Joan Littlewood has directed a better play than I wrote.' After The Hostage he said 'Fuck Joan Littlewood.'" The Hostage would mark the peak of Behan's career. His prodigious boozing was financed by the royalties from the plays and his autobiography, Borstal Boy (1958), and as his wealth and fame grew, his output dwindled almost to nothing. He died in 1964, aged 41.

Interest in Behan himself hasn't dimmed in the intervening years - Peter Sheridan made a film about his life in 2000 - so why, then, has The Quare Fellow not been revived here or in Ireland (where the last major production was at the Abbey in 1982)? Dromgoole blames "the over-stimulated fuss about The Hostage. Because that was the bigger commercial success and was part of Littlewood's strange blend of truthful acting and variety, people have carried on associating Behan with that style and it becomes how they label that time and him." But there could be more practical reasons for its infrequent appearances. Economically, the play's hefty cast of 22 male characters is a prohibitive factor for most theatres, even at the best of times. Dromgoole, however, has made his devotion to "putting flesh on stage" a key plank of OSC's policy, with companies of 15 and 16, respectively, for last year's revivals of The Cherry Orchard and Sergeant Musgrave's Dance, and now 17 at Burke's disposal for The Quare Fellow (some of whom will double up).

Behan's masterstroke in The Quare Fellow - brought off a year before Samuel Beckett did something similar in Waiting for Godot - is to deny us even a glimpse of the title character. We learn nothing about his motives for murder, nor does Behan use him or his family to manoeuvre the audience into the kind of emotional tug-of-war that dominates death row films such as Dead Man Walking or, indeed, the 1962 film of The Quare Fellow, which spuriously added a torrid affair between a naive young warder, Crimmin (Patrick McGoohan), and the condemned man's wife (Sylvia Syms). Burke hates the screen version, directed by German born low-budget specialist Arthur Dreifuss, but Dromgoole, who's admired the play since studying it at university 20 years ago, admits to "quite liking the film's mix of the very cheesy with a British cinéma-vérité approach.

They do at least stop short of introducing us to the quare fellow, thank God." In its single location, narrow time frame and detailed presentation of methodical labour, The Quare Fellow could be classed alongside the English "work plays" that followed, such as Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen or David Storey's The Contractor. "You don't get drawn into a 'Should we, shouldn't we' argument about capital punishment," adds Dromgoole. "You're just presented with the fact of execution and how a group of people do it and deal with it and you get to the end and think, 'Thank God we've escaped that particular sort of barbarism.'" All prison life is represented in Behan's ensemble. We meet young, middle-aged and elderly prisoners, novice and long-serving warders, the governor and the hangman who, like Britain's most notorious executioner, Albert Pierpoint, pops over to Dublin from his regular job as a pub landlord in England. "Even the parts that come across as small on the page have so many wonderful layers to them," says Burke.

Dunlavin, one of the old lags, is Behan's most memorable creation, with a vaudevillian's line in throwaway gags ("Killing your wife is a natural class of a thing could happen to the best of us.") and a desperate thirst for alcohol. In the play's most tragicomic image, he takes surreptitious swigs from the bottle of meths that Warder Regan is using to rub down his rheumatic legs. Regan is the play's moral centre and a supremely deadpan, ironic commentator, rebuking Holy Healey, the prisons inspector, for suggesting that the quare fellow will be redeemed by receiving the sacrament: "We can't advertise 'Commit a murder and die a happy death,' sir. We'd have them all at it." Regan and his colleagues, their minds fixed on "pay, promotion and pension", keep desultory watch over the prisoners as they sweep the yard, rag each other, bet on the likelihood of an eleventh-hour reprieve and help to dig the condemned's grave ("We'll be eating cabbage off that one in a month or two," notes Neighbour, Dunlavin's rickety old pal).

Apart from a botched suicide attempt, there are no incidents to speak of, and yet, as Burke says, "Behan shows that for the prisoners, the day before an execution is quite an exciting time. There's something different to talk about and that will make this particular day go quicker." Burke has made some changes to the original. After consulting "an Irish genius", Butcher Boy author Patrick McCabe, she felt confident about excising a few musical numbers from Behan's script. Songs like the one the young prisoners sing as they sweep ("Only one more cell inspection/ We go out next Saturday") have got the chop. "I think the songs were absolutely right for the 1950s, to soften the blow of a hard-hitting play, but I think that now they're a bit twee and 'diddly-dee'. Pat seemed to like my take on it, but I've just got to have the courage of my convictions and hope that if the spirit of Behan is watching he'll approve." With or without approval from on high, Burke's Quare Fellow has the makings of a must-see; bearing in mind the customary interval between the play's British productions, it could be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

'The Quare Fellow': Liverpool Playhouse (0151 709 4776), 12 to 21 Feb; Oldham Coliseum (0161 624 2829), 24 to 28 Feb; Glasgow Citizens (0141 429 0022), 2 to 6 March; Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds (01264 769 505), 23 to 27 March; Oxford Playhouse (01865 305 305) 30 March to 3 April; Theatre Royal, York (01904 623 566), 6 to 10 April; Tricycle, London NW6 (020 7326 1000), 14 April to 8 May Brendan Behan Essay - Brendan Behan World Literature Analysis - eNotes.com Brendan Behan Essay - Brendan Behan World Literature Analysis Navigate Study Guiderows link Link The militant republicanism that he inherited from his family and the years of imprisonment both in England and Ireland are the influences

 most apparent in Behan’s writings.

If Behan had not been sent to the juvenile reformatory after his arrest in Liverpool, there would have been no autobiographical Borstal Boy. It was in Ireland’s prisons where he first began The Quare Fellow, which tells of the last few hours before the subject, the quare fellow, is to be hanged. The Hostage, Behan’s other major drama, relates the saga of an English soldier kidnapped by the Irish Republican Army. Early political commitments and years in prison made Behan more than merely a bitter reporter of his experiences. Anger is a major aspect of his writing. He is antiestablishment, as might be predicted, but not anti-English. His attitudes were far from knee-jerk Anglophobia; Dickens was one of his favorite authors, and his years in the Borstal exposed him to the sum of human types, from cruel authoritarianism to friendly camaraderie among his fellow prisoners, most of whom were English. Behan was a Catholic, steeped in that tradition, but a chief villain in Borstal Boy is a Catholic prison priest who excommunicates Behan for his IRA membership, thus sundering him from the sacraments and consolations of his church.

In Behan’s last major play, The Hostage, the least sympathetic character is the pompous and arrogant IRA officer in charge of the kidnapped English soldier. Behan’s political ideology may be summed up in the following statement in the introduction to the program of The Hostage: “I respect kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and old women warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.” Although Behan’s plays were first produced in Dublin, he had greater success and recognition in London. His English fame coincided with the time of the “angry young men” such as John Osborne and his Look Back in Anger (pr. 1956, pb. 1957), and critics often categorized Behan as belonging to that theatrical movement. Behan’s anger was not the same as Osborne’s. Behan’s writings, even the most serious, are generally imbued with humor—sometimes slapstick, sometimes satiric, usually both.

He once claimed that he would laugh at a funeral as long as it was not his own. Generally his humor, no matter how broad, had a sharp point, and poignancy and desperation underscored it. In The Quare Fellow two inmates are to be hanged, convicted of murder. One has chopped up his brother; the other has killed his wife with a silver-headed cane. The latter is reprieved; the former, the quare fellow, is not. Behan’s implication that wife-killing, especially with a silver-headed cane, is acceptable suggests something about both the value society gives women and the importance of class differences. Although humor suffuses Behan’s writings, his characters are inevitably trapped in desperate situations (prisons, for example) from which there is no easy escape. Borstal Boy is one of the great works of prison literature, and the account of his arrest and life in prison portrays a closed and brutal world. In The Quare Fellow it is not only the prisoners who are captives but also their guards and prison authorities.

There is no formal prison in The Hostage but the setting is a brothel, which is another type of prison, not only for the British soldier but also for his IRA guards and the other inhabitants of the brothel, both sellers and buyers. Even history can be a prison. The Monsewer, the owner of the house, is an old Irish revolutionary, who has become a prisoner of his own biography and Ireland’s past. In Behan’s short story “The Confirmation Suit,” a young boy is forced to don a suit for his confirmation made by a Miss McCann. The suit, however, has narrow lapels and large buttons, but in spite of his shame the boy is constrained to wear it to his first communion. There is no escape. In Behan’s world, nevertheless, there is always the possibility of freedom. After the boy’s mother tells Miss McCann that he hates the suit, the boy discovers Miss McCann with head bowed, shaking with tears. Following her death, as an act of contrition he willingly wears the despised suit to her funeral. It is an act of homage to Miss McCann, but also a liberation of himself.

In The Hostage the British soldier is accidentally killed when the Irish authorities storm the brothel in an attempt to free him. Even death, however, sometimes has no dominion. At the end of the play the soldier rises and sings. The Quare Fellow Brendan Behan - IMDb IMDb Writer | Soundtrack Brendan Behan was born on February 9, 1923 in Dublin, Ireland as Brendan Francis Aidan Behan. He was a writer, known for Borstal Boy (2000), The Quare Fellow (1962) and Gisslan (1996). He was married to Beatrice Ffrench-Salkeld. He died on March 20, 1964 in Dublin. See full bio » Born: a list of 5865 people created 11 months ago Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDbPage How much of Brendan Behan's work have you seen?

Known For 1977 Die Geisel (TV Movie) (play "The Hostage") 1972 Gartenparty (TV Movie) (play) 1968 Terroristi (TV Movie) (book "Borstal Boy") 1966 Gisselet (TV Movie) 1964 Der Spaßvogel (TV Movie) (play "The Quare Fellow") 1964 About Religion (TV Series) (poetry and prose - 1 episode) 1963 Særlingen (TV Movie) (based on play) 1962 Gisslan (TV Movie) (play) - The Quare Fellow (1958) ... (original play) / (play) Hide 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis (writer: "The Old Triangle") 1976 Mousiki vradya (TV Series) (lyrics - 1 episode) - Neo Kyma (1976) ...

(lyrics: "To gelasto paidi") Hide 1959 Small World (TV Series) Himself 1971 Omnibus (TV Series documentary) Himself - Subject Personal Details Other Works: Stage Play: The Hostage. Drama. Written by Brendan Behan [only Broadway credit during lifetime]. Scenic Design by Frederick Fox. Directed by Joan Littlewood . Cort Theatre (moved to The Ethel Barrymore Theatre from 14 Nov 1960- 10 Dec 1960, then moved to The Eugene O'Neill Theatre from 12 Dec 1960- close): 20 Sep 1960- 7 Jan 1961 (127 ... See more » Publicity Listings: 1 Print Biography | 3 Articles | See more » Height: Brendan Behan - Bio, Family, Facts, Age: 41 | Hot Birthdays Brendan Behan Album2 Pictures About Talented Irish poet and playwright who died of alcoholism. He wrote The Quare Fellow, The Hostage, and Borstal Boy. He was part of the Irish Republican Army. Veronica Lake also had difficulty with alcoholism throughout her life.

Before fame At age 13, he left school to join his father's profession as a house painter. Related to He married Beatrice Salkeld in 1995. Playwright Brendan Behan born on 09 02 1923 in . Until now, Brendan Behan's age is 41 year old and have Aquarius constellation. Count down 355 days will come next birthday of Brendan Behan !

Question: Who wrote The Quare Fellow and Borstal Boy?
Answer: Brendan Behan