Too Human Behan

What in this household was considered one of the most dreaded film projects of 2000 has turned out to be, by any standards, one of the best.

Peter Sheridan s mid-budget silver-screen remake of the classic Brendan Behan book The Borstal Boy is a joy from start to finish: it s a visually unimposing, but very emotionally accurate, revisiting of Behan s best-loved opus. Like its source, it s shot through with brutal honesty, heavily infused with pitch-black humour, and highlighted by stunningly accomplished central performances from a young cast that includes Shawn Hatosy and Danny Dyer.
Directed in effective and unpretentious fashion by accomplished stage director Sheridan, brother of Jim, it s obviously of primary interest to Behan fans, but few who see it should have any cause for regret.
The most pleasant surprise of all is the seamless perfection of a Dublin accent achieved by its lead actor, American-born-and-bred Shawn Hatosy. After recent exposure to the lamentable Paddy accents of such Hollywood luminaries as Kevin Spacey and Joan Allen, Hatosy s mastery of the local argot (as well as his overall performance) borders on the breathtaking.
Sheridan is effusive in his praise of the young lead: He s a fuckin amazin young fella. To come over and hit the Dublin speech on the head, which is so difficult to do for Americans especially the men, I ve noticed the women do much better that was our biggest worry. Cause with a character as Dublin as Behan, if you get it wrong, you might as well forget it, there s no point. And I was seriously worried, for the first week, whether the kid would get it. He had to work like fuckin mad, but he got there. He listened to it first-hand, I don t believe in voice coaches. They work on a rare handful of actors, but most of the time it ends up giving them a hybrid thing that s neither here nor there. Shawn, though, turned out to be a genius with accents. I just said to him listen to me all day, and imitate me all day . This would involve taking him to restaurants and saying convince this young wan here thach yer from Dublin , and the first few times were a disaster, it wasn t happening. But he stuck it, and he got good.
Despite the posthumous personality cult that has attached itself to him, Behan s legend owes far more to his notoriety than any especial literary greatness.
More awkwardly still, Behan s unapologetic republicanism, rampant alcoholism and propensity for immoderate behaviour certainly render him a more controversial figure now than he ever was during his lifetime. Aware of the myriad problems an unvarnished portrait of the young man might pose for post-PC, post-revisionist audiences, Sheridan has cleaned up Behan s speech beyond recognition ( I don t think there s a single fuck in the film ) and generally presented him in as sympathetic a light as could be hoped/expected/feared.
When it s put to Sheridan that, if the drink hadn t killed Brendan Behan, the Good Friday agreement probably would have, he responds: Well, there s no way of knowing how his outlook would have developed, but his brain was so sharp that he had that Wilde-like ability to say in one sentence what other people took an hour to say. And he always said the terrorists are the guys with the little guns and the little bombs . Meaning, of course, that the Americans and the Russians had the big ones. And you must remember, it was about 1956 when he said this it was so far-out and at the same time so spot-on.
He was, though, somebody who came to a position of believing that violence didn t work even though he never lost his political convictions and would have always been, y know, an IRA man at heart, he kind of thought (pause)... I ve just been thinking about this a lot, cause the movie is on my consciousness.
When he went to England with the bomb in 39, and he was caught and it didn t go off about a week after he arrived in England, a woman was killed in Coventry with her kid, at a post-box, while she was posting a letter. An IRA bomb. And Brendan was haunted by this for years, he had severe nightmares about it. Even though it wasn t his bomb. I remember his wife Beatrice telling me that for years, he was haunted by the mental picture of the woman and the child being blown to bits, and he felt guilty by association.
But in terms of bringing his personality in the play to life, without leaving out the politics I kinda thought we dealt with it pretty well in the film. That last scene where he says I ll stop fightin yez till you ve beaten Hitler, but after that I reserve me options that, to me, was the key political moment in the film. Cause where that s placed in the film tells you that there s a hierarchy of evil here. I haven t lost my political beliefs that you re wrong, but I m prepared at the moment to see that we ve both got a bigger enemy now. I thought that was an important statement for him to make in the film so that even though he s had a horrible growing up, sexually and in every other way, the thing about Brendan which made him such a warm person was that he had no bitterness.
Like he spent a lot of time in jail in England, and if you take his life from 16 to 26, he spent eight years of that in jail. And for somebody who d spent that much time behind bars, he d no bitterness, no chips on the shoulder. He didn t hate the fuckin screws and the English...when you read Borstal Boy, what comes across is I actually did a lot of growing up here. I actually met a load of really nice people there s almost a fondness. That s what s most remarkable about him, the lack of bitterness.
Behan s own prose is crammed to bursting point with fuck this and fuck that s ...
No, he never used that word, Sheridan rightly corrects us, it was f-u-g-h ...
Yet his mouth has been thoroughly rinsed clean for the purposes of the movie:
I don t like language, the director responds, with surprising firmness. Now that might sound strange, cause I use it an awful lot in me natural speech. I m fairly bad that way, but as a general rule, I don t like it. I kinda think it has an alienating effect sometimes on audiences, where it s like the law of diminishing returns, it suffers from over-use. It s almost like you go one way or the other you can go the Roddy Doyle route where every other word is fuck, cunt, bollox, shite , and that s perfectly OK cos it s almost like opera. It becomes musical. But if it s not done with any skill or spirit, it s downright boring I always remember Sean O Casey s recommendation to writers, he said Fuck, shit and all that stuff is the refuge of the lazy mind . I agreed with him and I still do. I think you can say the same thing I think if you use a fuck in the right place it can be really powerful. But if every fucker in the film is at it, it has no impact, it even turns bland.
Borstal Boy has few if any real weaknesses but the film s Brits , it must be said, are fairly one-dimensional (if amusing) stereotypes of evil condescension. This may have been entirely reflective of the way Behan perceived them, but leaves the film open to accusations of inverse bigotry (sample line: Ah, you re the Paddy! Shall we play a game of rugger? ) How does Sheridan plead?
The characters are as close as they could be to the way they came across in the book, he testifies. And to take one example, the guy who ran the prison, Joyce, seems to me to be an extremely liberal, far-thinking man, and treated the boys well. He s dead now, but there were TV programmes made about Behan in which they got to interview Joyce, and he came across as this kind of schoolmastery sergeant-major type with a heart, who worked on the principle of I ll treat you well if you treat me well . He was a kindly guy, by no means a monster. Others obviously weren t that good, though.
Pouring over Sheridan s CV to date, it appears that he s fairly interested in the subject of Behan, to say the least.
Yeah, you can say that, he laughs, I suppose it s inevitable when a guy that you ve had huge respect for grew up just up the street from you, and you grew up on stories about him, you felt like he was in your consciousness from the time you were aged six, and then he died when I was twelve, which was a huge shock, he was completely spent, and I remember wondering Jesus, what caused him to do that? And then you read his stuff, and all the biographies just an enormously fascinating man. And the fact that his reputation lives on so strongly even now speaks volumes for him the fact that he s still so loved and revered in Dublin after being dead for forty years.
Was Behan, as his biographers hint, an extremely unhappy individual?
Oh, yeah. There s no question about that. From the time the success kicked in, he was deeply troubled. Well, he d probably been deeply troubled before then, but I suppose the success and the money was a bit like drugs are nowadays suddenly, he was completely out of control. He could indulge his alcoholism on a fucking phenomenal scale whereas before that, there was always a lack of money, which is almost beneficial really for would-be alcoholics.
But yeah he used to piss himself, he used to shit himself, he was a mess. He was dried up, he couldn t write, he was using a tape recorder to try and write it was horrible, undignified stuff. The last three years of his life were just a nightmare. And just the sadness of someone who s obviously an active alcoholic being incapable of stopping, with such an enormous talent. It s getting into Shane MacGowan territory.
Sean Penn has, for years, expressed interest in Behan s life, and/or a feature film about it. Sheridan had already established contact with the actor well before Borstal Boy got underway.
I was working with him on a project, we spent several years trying to get a project going and very nearly did. Then when we were within a week of shooting it, he pulled out and it fell apart. It was personal stuff, he was in trouble in the relationship with Robin and there was just no way he could come to Ireland at the time. They subsequently got married and invited me to their wedding, so it s all OK. I hung out with Penn for a long time, like over five years I would have seen him a couple of times a year, and we d be out on the town and he s fucking wild, I can tell you. I drove across America in a car with him. It took a week and it was fucking unbelievable.
One last thing: any plans to film a Luke Kelly biopic?
There s an idea. I wrote the intro to his book, the one Des Geraghty got together and I ve always been interested in the man; we went to the same school, we re from the same parish. And again, I grew up on stories of Luke Kelly and then I got to know him well in his last few years, we used to drink together. I loved the guy, and I ve written about him and spoken about him quite a lot but as far as I know, Noel Pearson is making a film about him. I loved the guy, though every time you hear On Raglan Road , time just stands still. I m sure Noel will do a great job, though.

Borstal Boy opens nationwide on December 8th.