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Borstal Boy is a play adapted by Frank McMahon from the 1958 autobiographical novel of Irish nationalist Brendan Behan of the same title. The play debuted in 1967 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, with Frank Grimes as the young Behan.
- 1967
- Liverpool; Dublin, 1939
Borstal Boy is a 1958 autobiographical book by Brendan Behan. The story depicts a young, fervently idealistic Behan, who loses his naïveté over the three years of his sentence to a juvenile borstal, softening his radical Irish republican stance and warming to his British fellow prisoners.
- 342 pp (first edition)
- Hutchinson
- 1958
- Brendan Behan
When young Behan, who has joined the IRA, is sent to Liverpool to plant bombs in a shipyard, he is caught and sent to a harsh prison. There, Behan must figure out how to survive the brutality of sadistic guards, finding hope and discovering friendships, in spite of it all.
Borstal Boy (Original, Play, Broadway) opened in New York City Mar 31, 1970 and played through Aug 1, 1970.
That production was hugely successful, later travelling to Broadway, but it was undeniably a playful approach to Borstal Boy. The issue of Behan’s ambiguous sexuality or confused feelings in Borstal are certainly under-explored here.
Mar 16, 2011 · Borstal Boy, autobiographical work by Irish writer Brendan Behan, published in 1958. The book portrays the author’s early rebelliousness, his involvement with the Irish Republican cause, and his subsequent incarceration for two years in an English Borstal, or reformatory, at age 16.
Borstal Boy is a play adapted by Frank McMahon from the 1958 autobiographical novel of Irish nationalist Brendan Behan of the same title. The play debuted in 1967 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, with Frank Grimes as the young Behan.
