Mother of All the Behans: Imelda May sings gloriously – and shows an eye for bringing characters to life

Mother of All the Behans

3Olympia Theatre, Dublin

★★★★☆

While the subject may be Kathleen Kearney Behan, republican and folk singer – and mother of all of them – the centre of this show is undoubtedly Imelda May. Specifically, the singer’s voice: clear and pure, characterful, humorous, by turns powerful and gentle.

This new production of Peter Sheridan’s 1987 one-woman stage adaptation of Brian Behan’s book about his mother was first (and widely, celebratedly) performed by Rosaleen Linehan, whose additional script material is credited here. Sheridan again directs this new Verdant production, marking the centenary of the birth of the playwright and poet Brendan Behan, Kathleen’s best-known child.

Kathleen Behan, who was born in 1889, had an incredibly eventful life, against the backdrop of the State’s formation and early years. We meet her initially in her nursing-home bed, recalling her life shortly before she died, aged 94. The simply-structured script skips through her long life chronologically: May, more credible as the younger Behan, emerges from the bed to animatedly tell the tale.

Born into a farming family in Co Meath, and a republican and socialist from early age, Kathleen Behan ran messages for James Connolly and Patrick Pearse in 1916 and had a crush on Michael Collins (“a woman’s man”); she was devastated by the loss of his leadership when he died. She married twice (her first husband died in the 1918 flu epidemic) and had seven children. It was a life of poverty, some of it in a tenement, on Russell Street in Dublin, owned by her idiosyncratic, secret-drinking mother-in-law, “Granny”, who spent her days in bed with her adult son to maximise her rental return, and later moving to “the wilds” of Crumlin’s early social housing, with poor transport and few amenities. She worked for Maud Gonne, met Nora “Barnacle by name, Barnacle by nature” and made a late name for herself as a singer and for her TV appearances.

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Along the way there are many people and events. May, thrown in at the deep end in her first theatrical role, displays comic timing and an eye for bringing characters to life, often humorously. Lifting up the infant Brendan so his father, Stephen, can see him over the prison wall, she wonders was it that early experience that gave Brendan “a liking for penal institutions”.

To 2023 eyes the bare bones of Kathleen Behan’s life are challenging and troubling: poverty and instability; squandered wealth; multi-generational alcoholism; a grandmother who fostered Brendan’s drinking from the age of six; half the family behind bars; a husband she dotes on despite his being a whining drunkard; a son who, after a brief blaze of glory, pissed away his immense talent and died of drink and fecklessness at 41. All this is treated as grist to the mill of her life, with an unquestioning acceptance and a natural resilience.

Kathleen Behan’s story is mostly played here for gentle humour and stories of the Dublin characters, rather than for a deeper understanding or exploration of the woman herself. Which is just fine, because the shape and events of her life are mainly used here as a vehicle for a wonderful multitude of songs, and May’s superlative interpretation of them, accompanied by Seán Gilligan’s keyboard from the side.

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“I never needed a drink to sing,” Kathleen Behan says. And sing Imelda May does, gloriously, ranging from humorous ditties like Miss Houligan’s Cake to a beautiful Laughing Boy, a melodic Sweet Daffodil Mulligan and Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye, and a spine-tingling Auld Triangle. The whole makes for a highly entertaining evening, with the audience clearly enjoying both story and song. But, more, the collection of songs, familiar and less known, has a coherence and a social and musical significance.

Mother of All the Behans continues at 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin 2, until Saturday, August 26th