The immigration man read my deportation order, looked at it and handed it back to me. 'Are you Irish?' he asked me. 'No' I said 'as a matter of fact, I'm Yemenite Arab.' Two detectives came forward who were evidently there to meet me. 'Apparently he is Brendan Behan,' they said. The immigration off[...]
I have him bitched, balloxed and bewildered, for there's a system and a science in taking the piss out of a screw and I'm a well-trained man at it.' So writes Brendan Behan, poet, writer and literary legend, of the episode that coloured his life. Arrested in Liverpool as an agitator for the IRA, he [...]
An essential text in the development of modern British drama
Includes Behan's complete dramatic works in English, three-full length plays and three one-act plays, with biographical details on Behan and the Irish Republican Movement[...]
Brendan Behan was already a legend of the literary world when he died in 1964 at the age of forty-one. Born in Dublin in 1923 into a highly talented family forced by unusual circumstances into tenement living, his mother's Irish republican idealism and his father's literary interests were defining i[...]