Brendan Behan - 30th March 2012
The lives of most Irish writers are as compelling as their works. Brendan Behan, a self-styled ‘drinker with writing problems’ was no exception. The life of the Dublin-born author, poet, playwright and short-story writer (1923-1964) will be portrayed through dramatisation of selections from his work by The Monaco-Ireland Arts Society on March 30, at 8:30pm, in the Auditorium of the Lycée Technique. The Dubliner had the Irish talent for tackling tragedy with humour - usually rollicking and ribald - and with sublime disregard for the established norms of society, even when the subject was as scabrous as hanging. Behan himself once said, “I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in winter and happier in summer.”
The Monaco-Ireland Arts evening begins with The Hostage, a shameless romp through touchy Anglo-Irish relations set around an IRA kidnap and ends with The Quare Fellow, an indictment of capital punishment by ‘the terrible, trivial and impressive ritual’ of hanging.
Describing the programme, Director Virginia Disney promised, “We will add pepper and salt with bawdy jokes, monologues and singing, just as Behan himself did in his dramas. And in the second half of the programme there will be a short demonstration of Irish dancing.” Critiquing Behan’s work, The Evening Standard wrote: ‘The English habitually write as if they were alone and cold at ten in the morning, the Irish write in a state of flushed gregariousness at an eternal opening time.”
Free but must be pre-booked.
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