Imelda May’s portrayal of Kathleen Kearney Behan is vivid, inspiring, clear sighted and mainly unsentimental. Although the final song Sweet Molly Malone, and this is a dramatized life stitched together with music, might suggest otherwise. We start with an old woman in a religious nursing home bed, listening to something spiritual and announcing herself. She is, from the beginning, feisty. She declares she doesn’t want a long illness, is ready to die tonight if necessary, but muses on matters philosophical. Who is God, for example, and what came before Him? And what about heaven and hell? Incidentally, May acts old age very well.
We move on to the key people in Kathleen’s story. Her first marriage to Jack Furlong was a love match and we hear in a song about their encounter ‘down by the Liffey’. They were only married for three years as he succumbed, like one person in every Dublin house, to the Spanish flu that felled hundreds of thousands in 1918. This is touching.
There is a lot of politics too as well as emotion. May was a pro-worker, passionate socialist and we witness her belting out the Red flag with feeling. She was also a fierce republican and acted as a courier to the Dublin GPO building during the Easter rising. She remembers Michael Collins fondly, broad as he was tall, with long legs up on the desk. Collins, who stood up to the English then agreed to Partition, is recalled in The Laughing Boy, by Kathleen’s twelve-year-old son Brendan with moving lines about the revolutionary’s bloody death.
The first half covers Kathleen’s widowing and second marriage, to house painter and radical Stephen Behan, father of the super talented tribe. He comes across as partly absent because he spent time in prison for carrying IRA arms and first saw baby Brendan outside a prison window. We learn about the six-year-old Brendan collecting beer for his granny, watering it down and consuming half the brew This was where his taste for alcohol came from, according to his mother. But there isn’t maybe quite enough detail about the most famous Behan to satisfy. We whizz through the London success and Champagne lifestyle of the author of The Hostage before gaining an affecting depiction of his early death at forty-one.
But this is a rich, entertaining introduction to a remarkable woman, brought to life by an actor and singer blessed with a voice that does justice to the music which includes a spirited All around my Hat. Peter Sheridan, who adapted Brian Behan’s book of his mother’s reminiscences, directs with care.
Jane Hardy
