CIAN O hEIGEARTAIGH,
Sir, - Your obituary of the theatre producer Joan Littlewood (The Irish Times, September 28th) gives the impression that it was Joan who "discovered" Brendan Behan, and who first brought his play The Quare Fellow to the stage.
In fact it was Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift who staged the first production at their Pike Theatre in Dublin, in November 1954, and it was Swift who was mainly responsible for shaping the play into the form in which it was produced. All this is amply documented in her book Stage By Stage, and in Alan Simpson's Beckett, Behan and a Theatre in Dublin.
It is true that Joan Littlewood brought the play and its author to a wider audience; but if Simpson and Swift had not first seen the glint of gold in Behan's early drafts - rejected previously by the Abbey, by Edwards-MacLiammoir and by Cyril Cusack - she probably would never have heard of it. - Yours, etc.,
CIAN Ó hEIGEARTAIGH, Orwell Gardens, Dublin 14.