Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan (1923-1964), Irish playwright and poet, remembered as a great wit and entertainer. He was born on Dublin's north side to a family of storytellers and singers. Behan left school at age 13 to apprentice as a house painter. The following year he joined the outlawed Irish Republican Army (IRA), in which his father had also been active. He was arrested in 1939 when he was found with bomb-making equipment and spent three years in a reform school in England. Behan was released in 1941 and deported to Ireland. Shortly after his release, he was sent to prison on an attempted murder charge. Five years later he was released.

Behan then returned to painting houses and began writing. Two of his lyric poems appeared in Nuabhéarsaíocht (New Verse, 1950), a collection of the most important Irish-language poems written between 1939 and 1949. He also wrote radio plays and produced sketches for the Irish Press between 1954 and 1956.

Behan's first success as a playwright came with the premiere of The Quare Fellow (1954), the title of which refers to prison slang for a condemned man. He began the play in Irish while in prison but completed it in English after his release. The Quare Fellow was produced first at the Pike Theatre in Dublin, but it was the 1956 production directed by Joan Littlewood in Stratford, England, and later in London, England, that established Behan's reputation as a dramatist. His public appearances in connection with the play branded him as a showman notorious for his unpredictable and outrageous behavior.

Behan's second major play, The Hostage (1958), was also written first in Irish (as An Giall). It is based on a short story about an English soldier held hostage by the IRA. Set in a brothel, The Hostage is a vehicle for songs and stories. It, like The Quare Fellow, is less concerned with plot than with character and dialogue. Behan published his reform-school autobiography, Borstal Boy, in 1958. Written in the tradition of Irish political prison literature, the book is considered his masterpiece.

Behan's later prose works include two taped travelogues, Brendan Behan's Island: An Irish Sketchbook (1962) and Brendan Behan's New York (1964). He also wrote The Scarperer (1964), a detective novel set in the underworlds of Dublin and Paris, France, and the autobiographical Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965), which he dictated on his last visit to the United States and which was edited following his death.