A Drink with Brendan Behan
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Gerry Smyth and Andrew Sherlock are writing a new stage play based on the life and work of Brendan Behan – one of the best Irish dramatists of the twentieth century, but also a tragic and controversial figure who divides critical and political opinion.
Behan was a revolutionary, a bisexual, a lapsed Catholic and an alcoholic – a heady brew by anyone’s standards!
Like Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh, he belonged to the ‘lost generation’ of Irish writers forced to come to terms with life after the revolution but before the arrival of the nation in whose name that revolution had been instigated and fought.
Behan’s life reveals much about what historians have called the ‘postcolonial century’; but it can also tell us much about the relationship between art and celebrity, and more again about the nature of fear and desire in the modern world. It is a parable of our time.
The Brother
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‘Flann O’Brien’ was one of the many pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan – a novelist, playwright and (under another pen name: Myles na gCopaleen) a columnist for The Irish Times from 1940 until the time of his death in 1966. It was in this column that O’Brien developed the characters who feature in The Brother. The man who tells stories about his more interesting brother is a staple of Dublin pub life. O’Brien took this form and infused it with deeply embedded elements of humour and angst. Like the poet Patrick Kavanagh and the playwright Brendan Behan, Flann O’Brien belongs to the ‘lost generation’ of Irish writers, stranded between the high modernism of Joyce and Yeats, and the postcolonial Celticism of writers such as Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel. The presiding tone of his writing may be humorous, but the question persists: ‘funny strange or funny ha-ha’?
Click here to listen to The Brother's featuring song.
Will The Real Flann O'Brien...?
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It’s April Fool’s Day 1966 and the Irish writer Flann O'Brien lies dying in a Dublin hospital. As he slips into unconsciousness he halucinates a series of encounters with a variety of twentieth-century Irish luminaries, including Ernie O'Malley, James Joyce, Eamon de Valera and Samuel Beckett. The resulting conversations reveal a lot about O'Brien's career, but more about the modern history of the country in which he lived.
