He lived fast and died young, but how good a writer was Behan?

CULTURE SHOCK:Brendan Behan's plays were a breath of fresh air for English theatre, but the writer was not quite so innovative in an Irish context, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

BRENDAN BEHAN is commemorated with, among other things, a statue in Dublin, a pub named in his honour in Boston, a brilliant Shane MacGowan song ( Streams of Whiskey) and an appearance in the cult comic series Preacher. In terms of fame beyond the literary world, he was probably the most successful Irish self-promoter since George Bernard Shaw. Along with James Dean, the beats and Dylan Thomas he helped to initiate the live-fast-die-young cult that helped many a rock star to an early death. And yet the revival of The Quare Fellowat the New Theatre in Dublin is a reminder that Behan's plays are rarely staged. (The last production of The Quare FellowI can remember was at the Abbey in 1984.) Which raises an impertinent question: was Behan actually a great playwright?

He was certainly a powerful and important one. The two stage plays he finished in his lifetime, The Quare Fellowand The Hostage, are mighty assaults on the mainstream of both Abbey naturalism and polite English drawing-room theatre. For all their rambunctious energy and comic anarchy, they are morally serious dramas, committed to the belief theatre could move far beyond domesticity and embrace the complexities of the big world. They deal with questions of life and death: The Quare Fellowunfolds in the context of an impending judicial execution; The Hostage, also shaped by imprisonment, likewise builds towards the violent death of a young squaddie, Leslie.

The odd thing about Behan's theatre is it was arguably more important to London than to Dublin. Kenneth Tynan registered the impact of The Quare Fellowin London in terms that were flattering to Behan but rather infuriating for any other Irish person: "It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness." (It did not strike him, obviously, that Ireland's sacred duty might not be to England at all.)

This was not entirely Tynan's fault. Behan was certainly a breath of fresh air for the English theatre. The prison setting of The Quare Fellowand its grimly realistic treatment of life at the bottom of the heap came two years before John Osborne's supposedly revolutionary but much tamer Look Back in Anger.

But he was not quite so innovative in an Irish context. The Quare Fellowcame four years after Seamus Byrne's remarkable prison-based drama Design for a Headstonewas staged at the Abbey in 1950. Behan's play owes a great deal to Byrne's, not least in its use of a huge cast with no conventional central character. The Hostage, meanwhile, is uncomfortably close to Frank O'Connor's brilliant 1931 story Guests of the Nation, of which it is virtually an unacknowledged dramatisation. O'Connor, rather gracefully, decided to avoid seeing the play so he would not be upset. (Both the story and the play, of course, feed in to Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game.) Equally, Tynan's praise for Behan's use of language was also framed in terms that nowadays would read very much like condemnation: "The English hoard words like misers; the Irish spend them like sailors."

Alan Simpson, who gave Behan his break with the first staging of The Quare Fellowat his tiny Pike Theatre in 1954, and who subsequently resurrected Behan's last play, Richard's Cork Leg, from drafts and fragments, noted Behan's tendency to "repetition and careless disregard of the powers of concentration of an audience". For all their comic energy and moments of sheer brilliance, Behan's plays tend to flirt with tedium, as the action assumes a holding pattern, waiting for the linguistic fog to clear.

It is striking, indeed, that Behan's most disciplined piece of theatrical writing is An Giall, the original of what became The Hostage. Working in his second language curbed his verbosity and forced him to use words more simply, directly and effectively. An Giallis the nearest we can get to a pure Behan play – the others were heavily edited or influenced by Simpson or Joan Littlewood. Without the now-dated topicality Littlewood encouraged in The Hostage, An Giallhas also aged better.

This is not to fall into the hoary old complaints that Littlewood exploited the poor innocent Irish boy and turned his good Gaelic play into an English music-hall farce. Behan knew what he was doing. What playwright would not have chosen the daring, self-conscious theatricality Littlewood was pioneering over, for example, the Abbey of Ernest Blythe, who had rejected The Quare Fellow? What is clear at this distance, however, is that Behan was so wide open to influence because he was never entirely in control of his own material. There is no sense in the few plays he managed to write that he had achieved the clarity of vision, the ability to fuse form and content, that marks a great dramatist. This was not entirely to do with his early death – John Synge, after all, was younger than Behan when he died. More probably, it has to do with an inability to persevere with the long, lonely struggle to get everything right.

The Quare Fellowand The Hostagewill always be worth seeing for their breadth of human sympathy, their dark humour and the bravery of their challenges to systems of power, whether official or unofficial. But the likelihood is that when Behan is remembered in the future, it will not be for his plays. It will be for his superb semifictional memoir, Borstal Boy. Oddly neglected in spite of its current relevance, it is one of the greatest books ever written about terrorism – not least because it is written by a terrorist. Actually, there's nothing odd about the neglect – the unacceptable message of the book is that societies can defeat terror by refusing to become uncivilised. In that challenging notion, Behan's paradoxical imagination is at its most potently subversive.