Joyce and O’Casey obviously returned the compliment. If anyone can straight-facedly sanitise the men who penned less than polite tableaux of slum-ridden, narrow-horizoned Dublin life in books like Dubliners or plays like The Plough and the Stars then...

Dublin literature reflects the city but it also reveals an awareness of the wider literary world. The young Joyce revered Ibsen, for Beckett, Proust was a mentor. Brendan Behan, a member of the IRA before he was 15, carried his Republican politics like...

SHOCK: Brendan Behan’s plays were a breath of fresh air for English theatre, but the writer was not quite so innovative in an Irish context, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE BRENDAN BEHAN is commemorated with, among other things, a statue in Dublin, a pub named...

The Irish Times - Friday, July 16, 2010 This new production of Brendan Behan’s begins with a short historical introduction that has the effect of freezing the play in time. From the outset we are not encouraged to engage empathetically with the play –

Trish, our two musician hosts, are possibly enjoying a larger audience than any other traditional musician on a showery summer’s evening in Dublin. The paddywhackery Oliver St John Gogarty meeting point doesn’t bode well. A motley collection of...

QUARE FELLOW was Brendan Behan’s breakthrough play, writes Sara Keating , marking his first journey back to England, where he had spent three years at borstal after being arrested on a mission to blow up Liverpool’s docks. It receives a revival next...