THE QUARE FELLOW
Tricycle

BRENDAN Behan was one of Ireland’s more radical playwrights: he joined an IRA-affiliated youth organisation at the age of nine, and at 16 was arrested while on a sabotage mission in England.
He went on to spend time in various prisons, which is why the gritty realism of this prison drama should come as no surprise.
The play opens with the unceremonious emptying of slop buckets, but the black humour which accompanies it sets the initial tone.
You’re never far away from a quip to take the edge off what is an extremely dark play centred around the issue of capital punishment – specifically hanging.
It is the imminent but ultimately off-stage hanging of a condemned man that casts the largest shadow over the narrative.
The humdrum prison routines of cell-tidying, visits from the doctor, and gazing longingly out of the windows at women fade from the script as Behan eloquently but tortuously brings characters and audience face to face with an execution.
Sean Campion’s utterly convincing performance as the conscience-stricken prison warder Regan brings home the ravaging long-term effects of a job where you have to accompany men to their death, witness it, and then deal with the aftermath.
“It’s a soft job between hangings,” he comments early on in the play.
Regan provides moral resonance in a world of inmates who seem strangely inured to the brutality around them.
Most of the warders seem to be similarly inured, but in a play encompassing 23 characters, everybody has a little philosophy to share, and we get a wide spectrum of perspectives.
Behan goes beyond the us and them mentality of warder versus and inmate and throws up something a lot more complex: a situation in which a condemned man might ask for a specific warder to be with him at his execution.
With such a large cast, Kathy Burke’s lively production mixes humour, aggression and pathos.
It’s easy to see why Behan’s first and best-known stage play is seldom revived, it’s a sprawling juggernaut of a ride, and sometimes feels over-burdened with too many characters, but its undeniably engaging theatre.

020 7328 1000
Until July 2