Word: borstal
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...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...
...Where Borstal Boy ended, Confessions begins: the teen-age I.R.A. demolitions expert, discharged from British reform school and launched on the short, sputtering, sodden, prison-checkered career that led down a hill to fame and death. It reads like a drunk shouting in a pub, happy as only such a man can be, and only half-remembering, not entirely clear in his mind what he wants to say. But the infectious Behan rhythm is unmistakable, and so is the Behan tongue. Mountjoy Prison, Strangeways Jail, bouts on the Left Bank, a party for a colleen celebrating her abortion, pimping...
Brendan Behan lost his battle with "the gargle," the two quarts of Irish whisky, chased by floods of Guinness stout, that he drank every day he was able. Some said it was a sad, wasted life, over at 41, but the Borstal Boy never said it. He was never that far gone that he couldn't knock out the stray book or play-the best of them, such as The Hostage and The Scarperer, being very good indeed, and the worst of them throbbing, at least, with that high, rollicking rebel spirit that made Behan different from other skins...