Remembering Brendan Behan at the Chelsea Hotel

Fresh from enjoying an acclaimed run off-Broadway, Janet Behan’s play Brendan at the Chelsea makes its Dublin debut at Project Arts Centre next week. Produced by Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, the play stars Adrian Dunbar as writer Brendan Behan.

As is popularly known, in his short but ridiculously eventful lifetime Behan became as renowned for his hard living and carousing as he did for his most famous writings, the play The Quare Fellow and novel Borstal Boy. In penning a drama about the Dublin writer, his niece Janet Behan admits she set out initially with the objective of restoring his reputation.

“Reading the early drafts, you would have thought that he was an altar boy,” she says. “But then a friend of mine told me: ‘There’s a character missing’. I said ‘Who?’. And he said ‘Well, it’s the drink, isn’t it?’.” Following an early reading of the play at the Everyman Palace in Cork, the theatre’s artistic director, Pat Talbot, made the same point.