Pagham couple celebrate Irish poet and playwright Brendan Behan

The piece Brendan – Son of Dublin – a play with music rather than a musical – will receive its premiere at the Irish Cultural Centre in London on February 8. It will then be performed for the Festival of Chichester this summer.

It follows on from John and Danny’s piece about Oscar Wilde.

As John says: “There is an underlying theme going throughout, that they are about young lives that are professionally affected. It feels like we are drifting towards examining and understanding the lives of young creative people that have their creativity cut short, like Oscar Wilde and now Brendan Behan but with this one there is a particular connection. Brendan was an Irish playwright who my mother knew growing up in Dublin in the 50s and 60s. Brendan was one of those people that evoke very polar opposite views in people. Some people see him as this creative genius, this wonderful character. Other people see him as this tortured soul who was not able to cope with everyday life, who was scruffy and drunken and anti-social. You've got the two sides of his character and how you viewed him depended on which side you saw. He had this great ability to evoke these opposing views around him and that's part of what makes him such an interesting character. You see the same with Oscar Wilde. Depending how you knew him, you saw him as either a villain or a hero. It means it's wonderfully fertile territory for us to explore. But we also look not just at our subject matter but also the people that were around him and close to him. Brendan was surrounded by really interesting people, in particular very powerful women and his story is an amazing one. He grew up as a working class lad in Dublin and he got sucked into the life of the IRA and Republicanism in Ireland. His family came from that tradition and by the time he was a young man he had served two long prison sentences as a result of his IRA activities. This was at a time during World War Two when there was so much going on in Europe as well. But he moved on from that and said he wanted to do something with his life and he began his writing, writing about his experiences. He wrote a piece called Borstal Boy which became a very seminal work in Irish and British theatre. He met Joan Littlewood who was running the Theatre Workshop in London at the time. She was very supportive of people that wrote provocative work and interesting work and she gave him the platform to put on the play which was his first big break

“What we're trying to do is to tell the life story of Brendan and also the key people that were around him. You hear the story of this drunken Irishman, this tortured soul who became a writer but we're trying to dig deeper than that and to explore much more than that. I think there is a much more profound story to tell about somebody who struggled with fame, who struggled with the system and who struggled with money. The story tells his life from the beginnings in Dublin through London through Paris and through to New York. And we have got Danny’s songs. It is a play with music rather than a musical. Often in a musical you get the song which is there to further the plot in music but with this it's almost like we're actually stopping the action to allow the emotions to be delivered more clearly and to allow the audience to understand what has happened and how the characters feel. Danny has written 12 new songs for the piece.”