Brendan Behan The Quare Fella
Behan’s play was perfectly poised: it premiered in November 1954, seven months after Michael Manning’s hanging in Mountjoy and seven months before Ruth Ellis’s hanging in Holloway. Both prisoners were executed by Albert Pierrepoint, perhaps the most prolific serial-killer Britain has produced, with 434 legal stranglings to his credit.
Human sacrifice itself remained on the Irish statute books until 1992, two years before the Eurovision interval-performance that became Riverdance. An erudite man and no cartoon-drunk, the author of The Quare Fella would have known that the theatrical form we call tragedy comes from the Greek tragodos, meaning the (death) procession of the scapegoat, and that the audience is therefore an accomplice to the cruelty it depicts.
In the fiftieth anniversary year of his passing, in the era of the YouTube universe when videos of state atrocities receive millions of Internet hits, the transmission of his masterpiece is more than timely.
This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.