His experiences would be vividly recounted in his memoir Borstal Boy (1958). Arrested for possession of explosives, Behan was sentenced to imprisonment for two years in a reformatory in Borstal, England. Having joined the Fianna Éireann, the Republican youth organization from which the IRA recruited members, at the age of eight, Behan embraced the cause of militant nationalism, and in 1939, when he was 16, he set out on a one-man bombing mission to blow up a British warship in Liverpool. Behan’s formal education in Catholic schools ended at age 14 when he apprenticed as a house painter. From his mother Behan acquired his Catholicism, a fine voice, and a theatrical personality from his father he inherited an irreverent agnosticism, exposure to literature, first encountering the works of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and O’Casey in his father’s library, and sympathy with the aspirations of Irish nationalism and the working class. Despite his subsequent depiction of growing up in working-class squalor that suited a more proletarian self-image, Behan actually was raised in a highly cultured home. His mother had been previously married to a veteran of the Easter Rising of 1916 who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Behan’s father, a Dublin house painter, was a Republican prisoner in Kilmainham Gaol at the time of his son’s birth. Behan was born in Dublin in 1923 during the civil war following the Irish War of Independence, and his life would from the start be dominated by an association with the Republican cause that opposed the partition of Ireland and allegiance to the British Crown, which were the conditions for Irish autonomy in 1922. With Behan there is an alternative to the constricted minimalism of playwrights such as John Osborne and Harold Pinter and a precedent for the dazzling inventiveness of subsequent playwrights such as Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill.īrendan Behan’s background is central to the persona he adopted and the values and attitudes that dominate his works, which are all drawn from his personal experiences. A product of his nothing-is-sacred attitude, The Hostage is Behan’s masterpiece, one of the earliest and best examples of the theater of the absurd in English that provided a new direction and new possibility for the socially realistic drama that dominated the English stage during the post–World War II period.

Like Wilde and George Bernard Shaw before him, Behan made his reputation in Britain as an iconoclast, mounting a full-frontal attack on literary conventions and the sacred cows of mainstream society. Again, like O’Casey, Behan extended his plays’ realism with experimental innovations. Like Sean O’Casey, who served as a major influence, Behan would help revitalize Irish theater by universalizing aspects of Irish history and Dublin slum life. As a dramatist Behan deserves better recognition for his achievement and influence. As fellow writer Flann O’Brien remarked, Behan “is much more a player than a playwright.” Books on Behan fall into two groups: recollections and critical studies of his works, with the former considerably outpacing the latter. By his early death at the age of 41 from alcohol-induced diabetes in 1964, Behan had become a legend, notorious for his drunken antics, youthful activities in the Irish Republican Army and imprisonments, defined by squandered promise rather than for actual accomplishment. Like his fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde who declared that he put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work, Brendan Behan invested his genius on his public and pub persona as the brawling, much-quoted Dubliner on a bender, obscuring a considerable talent as a dramatist. Robert Brustein, “Libido at Large,” in Seasons of Discontent Fields, and Dylan Thomas-Behan is pure Libido on a rampage, mostly in its destructive phase and if he has not yet achieved the Dionysian purity of those eminent anarchists, he is still a welcome presence in our sanctimonious times. Like his various prototypes-Jack Falstaff, Harpo Marx, W. He would like to hack the stage to bits, crunch the proscenium across his knee, trample the scenery underfoot, and throw debris wildly in all directions. It has been suggested that in The Hostage Brendan Behan is trying to “open up the stage.” This is an understatement.

Athina zsolt the hostage