The Hostage | Author Biography

Brendan Behan was born February 9, 1923, in Dublin, Ireland, into a working-class Irish-Catholic family that had long been involved in the Republican movement. His father worked as a house painter, a trade in which his son also trained, and he was active within the Irish-Catholic community in Dublin as a labor leader and an Irish Republican Army (IRA) soldier. Behan’s uncle Peader Kearney wrote the ‘‘Soldier’s Song,’’ which became the Irish national anthem, while his mother was also a passionate Republican.

Brendan Behan
Brendan Behan

Behan joined the Fianna, a Republican youth organization through which the IRA recruited members, and he became involved in the IRA when he was sixteen. In 1939 he was arrested in Liverpool for possession of explosives: he had planned to mount a single-man mission to blow up a British warship in the Liverpool docks. He was imprisoned for two years in a reformatory in Borstal, England, an experience that he wrote about in his memoir Borstal Boy (1958). Three years later, in Dublin in 1942, he was arrested again, this time for the vague crime of ‘‘revolutionary activities,’’ and was sentenced to three years in an Irish prison. (He also served time again in England in the late-1940s.)

After his release from prison in 1945, Behan returned to his old trade of house painting and also worked as a seaman and a free-lance journalist. During this period, he began to hone his skills as a writer. He shot to fame with the Joan Littlewood production of The Quare Fellow in London in 1956. The play is set in an Irish prison on the eve of a hanging. The work was followed by the even more successful production of The Hostage in 1958. The play is a loosely structured tragi-comedy centered around an English solider who has been kidnaped by the IRA and is being held hostage in a Dublin brothel. The success of this production had been preceded by the production in Dublin of the original Irish Gaelic version of the play, An Gial. Behan translated the play into English, and the text was then altered considerably by the improvisations of the Littlewood cast. Consequently the two plays differ from each other in quite important ways.

Behan’s reputation is based mainly upon his two major plays and memoir, the distinction of being one of the first Irish playwrights to break into the Postwar London theater scene, and his contributions to English-language Absurdist theater. Behan was an alcoholic, and as he became more successful his drinking increased and his creativity diminished. He died from complications resulting from alcohol abuse, diabetes, and jaundice in 1964. His brothers, Brian and Dominic, are also writers. Brian has written a memoir about and a novel based on the life of his mother, Kathleen, while Dominic made his name with the anti-IRA drama Posterity Be Damned (1960) and several family memoirs.