Gift of Golden Gab

The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paintpot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man's fate and man's follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth. Rarely has a people paid the lavish compliment and taken the subtle revenge of turning its oppressor's speech into sorcery.

Among recent Irish sorcerers with the gift of golden gab, Brendan Behan ranks high. In his rambunctiously brief 40-year life, he left the modern theater two plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, that have already shown a durable vitality. He also wrote an autobiography of his late teens called Borstal Boy. Though it lacks the density, scope and genius of Joyce's book, this is Behan's Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. With a loving fidelity, Playwright Frank McMahon has pasted together a play that is more of a stage scrapbook, an episodic family album in which the elder Behan (Niall Toibin) sits at the edge of the stage and acts as a kind of chorus commentator on his earlier self (Frank Grimes).

Common Humanity. In Act I, Behan is a boy of 16, an idealistic dupe of the Irish Republican Army just after the outbreak of World War II. He is captured in Liverpool even before he can open his suitcase full of explosives. In the local jail, he is brutally beaten by his captors and mocked and bullied by most of his fellow captives, who share a vindictively narrow loathing for the Irish and Catholicism, not to mention the I.R.A.

The distinctly less savage Act II seems almost bucolic, as Behan serves out his sentence on a "borstal," a kind of reform school. Here, boyish camaraderie and the spirit of barracks-room pranks prevail, so that Behan feels a wrenching, if temporary, sadness when the time comes for his release.

The borstal boys are an uncouth lot, mostly representative scum of the urban slums, yet their individual characters and common humanity are finely delineated by the superb Dublin Abbey Theater players. As the young Behan, Frank Grimes is one of those actors who make reviewers long for new adjectives of praise. He is evocative, ardent and totally winning. As the older Behan, Niall Toibin looks uncannily like the man he is playing, and his Gaelic way with a bawdy tune could set a barroom on the roar.

Borstal Boy is full of the warm stuff of life, brave and craven, joyous and sorrowing, abased one moment and noble the next. You don't have to be Irish to laugh and cry with it. The human heartbeat has no brogue.

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