A little piece of big theatre
On a miserable cold and wet Saturday evening in May we find ourselves waiting for friends in a pub in Clontarf. It’s called Connolly’s - The Sheds, and as I duck in my eye catches a sign that says it opened in that hungry year of 1845. We are lucky to get a seat. Grown men are transfixed to big screens logistically arranged around the pub; heads tilted back in what can only be described as spiritual rapture. Some grimace in pain, some look strangely ecstatic, while more assume the demeanour of helplessness. This variety of emotions is aroused by some important football match and is only punctuated by the regular swallowing of pints. Outnumbered by aficionados of the ‘beautiful game’ we joke in low tones that we are probably the only people in the pub who don’t know who’s playing; a shocking admission to make perhaps, to those nearby who are so invested emotionally in the proceedings on the big screens. We are not here for the football; we are here for the playacting concerning one of Ireland’s greatest literary geniuses.
There is no doubt about it, but Brendan Behan’s granny has an awful lot to answer for, and I don’t mean the Confirmation suit with the saucer buttons; I mean giving the eight-year-old chisler a taste for the gargle. But if the bold Brendán did not have the pint of plain and the ball of malt to feed his muse might he have remained a dis-satisfied house painter and did his untimely demise as a result of that particular addiction deny him his rightful place in the gallery of Nobel laureates? Did he create works of literature in spite of the gargle or because of it? ‘Them upstairs’ might help us answer these questions.
Same building different ambience; I am now at the Viking Theatre and I am about to watch Meet the Quare Fellow written by Jim and Peter Sheridan. Having ascended the narrow staircase, the overhyped drama of the 2016 FAI Cup Final is replaced by the tragic drama of Brendan Behan circa 1939-1964, encompassing his journey from handsome young political prisoner to shambling, demoralised, broken alcoholic.
The premise for this production is a 1964 Brendan at death’s door stumbling in and out of the delirium tremens examining his life with the assistance of his younger self. His mission is to convince God that he has done more good than bad in his life. On the perceived bad side then from a mid-twentieth century Irish perspective, not only has he done time for paramilitary Republican activities both as a teenager in Borstal and as a young man in Mountjoy, experimented with sexual partners of both genders, been on and off the wagon, never held onto a ‘decent job’ but, horror of horrors, he has been excommunicated from the Catholic Church. I think that for the time and place that was in it, no act of goodness was going to cancel this lot out.
To say that Brendan Behan’s life was pickled in alcohol is not an understatement, and the fact that he completed a respectable number of plays, stories and novels in an alcoholic haze is astounding. What is not astounding is that he died a mental and physical wreck at a mere forty-one. Not only had he become an intolerable boor, but he had damaged his physical health irrevocably. It’s a maddening shame and you could drive yourself to distraction surmising what could have been. Meet the Quare Fellow does not surmise what could have been; it re-enacts what was.
The older Brendan, played by Gary Cooke, comes across as the irreverent yet avuncular uncle with a colourful past who is keen to share his wisdom with the younger Brendan. He achieves this with the perfect balance of pathos and wit. The younger Brendan, played by Ryan Andrews, is a stick of dynamite (no pun intended) who explodes onto the little stage, a tsunami of energy and fine acting. Gary Cooke gives a truly stunning performance of Brendan’s final slide into that dark valley of no return. His portrayal of an alcoholic begging for his next drink, bordering on insanity and hating himself and the world is a physical and dramatic feat of pure brilliance.
Meet the Quare Fellow has a cast of three, made possible by the eclectic genius of Andrew Murray who pretty well plays all of the other roles – merely by changing his hat and his accent. He is equally convincing as a camp Liverpudlian landlord, a prison chaplain, an English Judge, an inconsolable Dublin mammy and even God himself - with a Cork accent.
Young Brendan, Old Brendan and, let’s call him Everyman manage in a very short time to bring us on a psychological exploration of Behan’s tragic life, the twofold tragedy being he never bounced back for long enough to achieve greatness on a world stage and the fact that he hated himself for this. With minimal props – a ladder, a badhran and a few hats, I seem to recall, they have achieved a theatrical tour de force upstairs in a Dublin pub. In some scenes they are almost resorting to mime, the hanging of the Quare Fellow being one. Another scene borders on Noh with the banging of a badhran representing the young Behan getting a hammering in his prison cell.
The audience gets to decide Behan’s fate; Heaven or Hell. Heaven wins tonight. This is a little piece of big theatre. I hope Ryan, Gary and Andrew get to perform this show in bigger venues around Ireland, the UK and America. Their clever acting brings us to a new level of understanding that maddening Dublin genius.
©Berni Dwan 2016
On a miserable cold and wet Saturday evening in May we find ourselves waiting for friends in a pub in Clontarf. It’s called Connolly’s - The Sheds, and as I duck in my eye catches a sign that says it opened in that hungry year of 1845. We are lucky to get a seat. Grown men are transfixed to big screens logistically arranged around the pub; heads tilted back in what can only be described as spiritual rapture. Some grimace in pain, some look strangely ecstatic, while more assume the demeanour of helplessness. This variety of emotions is aroused by some important football match and is only punctuated by the regular swallowing of pints. Outnumbered by aficionados of the ‘beautiful game’ we joke in low tones that we are probably the only people in the pub who don’t know who’s playing; a shocking admission to make perhaps, to those nearby who are so invested emotionally in the proceedings on the big screens. We are not here for the football; we are here for the playacting concerning one of Ireland’s greatest literary geniuses.
There is no doubt about it, but Brendan Behan’s granny has an awful lot to answer for, and I don’t mean the Confirmation suit with the saucer buttons; I mean giving the eight-year-old chisler a taste for the gargle. But if the bold Brendán did not have the pint of plain and the ball of malt to feed his muse might he have remained a dis-satisfied house painter and did his untimely demise as a result of that particular addiction deny him his rightful place in the gallery of Nobel laureates? Did he create works of literature in spite of the gargle or because of it? ‘Them upstairs’ might help us answer these questions.
Same building different ambience; I am now at the Viking Theatre and I am about to watch Meet the Quare Fellow written by Jim and Peter Sheridan. Having ascended the narrow staircase, the overhyped drama of the 2016 FAI Cup Final is replaced by the tragic drama of Brendan Behan circa 1939-1964, encompassing his journey from handsome young political prisoner to shambling, demoralised, broken alcoholic.
The premise for this production is a 1964 Brendan at death’s door stumbling in and out of the delirium tremens examining his life with the assistance of his younger self. His mission is to convince God that he has done more good than bad in his life. On the perceived bad side then from a mid-twentieth century Irish perspective, not only has he done time for paramilitary Republican activities both as a teenager in Borstal and as a young man in Mountjoy, experimented with sexual partners of both genders, been on and off the wagon, never held onto a ‘decent job’ but, horror of horrors, he has been excommunicated from the Catholic Church. I think that for the time and place that was in it, no act of goodness was going to cancel this lot out.
To say that Brendan Behan’s life was pickled in alcohol is not an understatement, and the fact that he completed a respectable number of plays, stories and novels in an alcoholic haze is astounding. What is not astounding is that he died a mental and physical wreck at a mere forty-one. Not only had he become an intolerable boor, but he had damaged his physical health irrevocably. It’s a maddening shame and you could drive yourself to distraction surmising what could have been. Meet the Quare Fellow does not surmise what could have been; it re-enacts what was.
The older Brendan, played by Gary Cooke, comes across as the irreverent yet avuncular uncle with a colourful past who is keen to share his wisdom with the younger Brendan. He achieves this with the perfect balance of pathos and wit. The younger Brendan, played by Ryan Andrews, is a stick of dynamite (no pun intended) who explodes onto the little stage, a tsunami of energy and fine acting. Gary Cooke gives a truly stunning performance of Brendan’s final slide into that dark valley of no return. His portrayal of an alcoholic begging for his next drink, bordering on insanity and hating himself and the world is a physical and dramatic feat of pure brilliance.
Meet the Quare Fellow has a cast of three, made possible by the eclectic genius of Andrew Murray who pretty well plays all of the other roles – merely by changing his hat and his accent. He is equally convincing as a camp Liverpudlian landlord, a prison chaplain, an English Judge, an inconsolable Dublin mammy and even God himself - with a Cork accent.
Young Brendan, Old Brendan and, let’s call him Everyman manage in a very short time to bring us on a psychological exploration of Behan’s tragic life, the twofold tragedy being he never bounced back for long enough to achieve greatness on a world stage and the fact that he hated himself for this. With minimal props – a ladder, a badhran and a few hats, I seem to recall, they have achieved a theatrical tour de force upstairs in a Dublin pub. In some scenes they are almost resorting to mime, the hanging of the Quare Fellow being one. Another scene borders on Noh with the banging of a badhran representing the young Behan getting a hammering in his prison cell.
The audience gets to decide Behan’s fate; Heaven or Hell. Heaven wins tonight. This is a little piece of big theatre. I hope Ryan, Gary and Andrew get to perform this show in bigger venues around Ireland, the UK and America. Their clever acting brings us to a new level of understanding that maddening Dublin genius.
©Berni Dwan 2016
