Word: borstal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Borstal Boy. A foaming mugful of the bitter, cheery malt of Brendan Behan's life...
...distinctly less savage Act II seems almost bucolic, as Behan serves out his sentence on a "borstal," a kind of reform school. Here, boyish camaraderie and the spirit of barracks-room pranks prevail, so that Behan feels a wrenching, if temporary, sadness when the time comes for his release...
...Irish sorcerers with the gift of golden gab, Brendan Behan ranks high. In his rambunctiously brief 40-year life, he left the modern theater two plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, that have already shown a durable vitality. He also wrote an autobiography of his late teens called Borstal Boy. Though it lacks the density, scope and genius of Joyce's book, this is Behan's Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. With a loving fidelity, Playwright Frank McMahon has pasted together a play that is more of a stage scrapbook, an episodic family album...
...borstal boys are an uncouth lot, mostly representative scum of the urban slums, yet their individual characters and common humanity are finely delineated by the superb Dublin Abbey Theater players. As the young Behan, Frank Grimes is one of those actors who make reviewers long for new adjectives of praise. He is evocative, ardent and totally winning. As the older Behan, Niall Toibin looks uncannily like the man he is playing, and his Gaelic way with a bawdy tune could set a barroom on the roar...
...Borstal Boy is full of the warm stuff of life, brave and craven, joyous and sorrowing, abased one moment and noble the next. You don't have to be Irish to laugh and cry with it. The human heartbeat has no brogue...