BRENDAN AT THE CHELSEA
Riverside Studios, London W6
Opened 17 January, 2008
***
Members of the Behan family can seem in
constant eclipse by one another and yet simultaneously the most
assiduous stewards of each other's legacies, all tangled together on
the Twister mat of posterity. The one with his right hand permanently
on Red is author and playwright Brendan, whose residency in New York
towards the end of his life is the subject of his niece Janet’s play.
This is apparently her second attempt to adapt Brendan Behan’s New York (1962) for
the stage; she says her first try left out the booze, so it must have
been a fairly short play. This, after all, is the man who once claimed
to have taken the advertising slogan “Drink Canada Dry” as a personal
challenge.
As Leonard Cohen might have put it: he can’t remember too well at the
Chelsea Hotel. We see him dictating a couple of sections of the book on
to a tape recorder (being by now so crippled by diabetes that he could
not hold a pen); avoiding delivering chapters to his publisher;
planning to go off with his mistress, but forgetting about her when he
goes out on the lash and not having told his wife, who arrives from
Dublin in Act Two, that he wants a divorce; and generally being a
tribulation and an ingrate to his hotel neighbour George Kleinsinger
and his minder, a young dancer. (Also, in a fantasy sequence, being
fellated by Lauren Bacall.)
With the right hairstyle, Adrian Dunbar looks surprisingly like Behan;
he has also captured the intrusive “-ah-” with which the Dubliner
punctuated his more formal utterances. Bríd Brennan as his wife
Beatrice is remarkably stoical for most of her time onstage, and Eva
Crompton as dancer Lianne gets the concern and frustration but not the
accent, which veers between Brooklyn and Bolton. The play itself is
rather too programmatic: a first-act press conference is transparently
an excuse to collect a bunch of Behan’s greatest epigrams (including
the one about critics being “like eunuchs in a harem”), and the second
act is just as obviously all bent towards a pair of scenes, the first
involving the plain-talking concern of George, the second an
increasingly bitter row with the newly arrived Beatrice. It makes for
an entertaining portrait, but not a radically illuminating one.