The great Irish writer and playwright Brendan Behan could turn a phrase.
How’s this? “The world is a madhouse, so it’s only right that it is patrolled by armed idiots.”
Or this? “Other people have a nationality. The Irish and Jews have a psychosis.”
Behan could also bend an elbow, and it was that frequent, self-destructive habit that brought him to an untimely end.
Like many writers, too many writers, Behan loved his liquor.
The wonderful New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, who knew Behan well, said that Behan had a sort of fatal attraction to saloons and pubs. That was where, Gill wrote, “the stink of sweat, smoke and spilled beer was perfume to him.”
The author of famous plays such as “Borstal Boy” and “The Hostage,” Behan died in 1964. He was 41.
For the the last quarter-century, a fellow named Shay Duffin has been keeping Behan alive, so to speak, with a one-man show called “Brendan Behan: Confessions of an Irish Rebel.”
He last performed the show in Chicago more than a decade ago, but has been here for a few weeks doing it again–through March 29–at the Mercury Theater on North Southport Avenue.
He has gathered all sorts of awards for his show, and has been hounded for some years by producers to turn his script into a movie.
He is finally doing so, with Robin Williams set–or as set as things get in Hollywood–to star as Behan, whose death prompted the London Daily Mail to note tragically that he was “too young to die, but too drunk to live.”
A sadder obituary you are unlikely soon to read.
