Richard S Cork Leg

RICHARD’S CORK LEG

Richard’s Cork Leg was begun near the end of Behan’s short, wasted life. He dashed off one act on assignment; by several accounts, it was the rejection of this draft that launched Behan on the round of drinking that soon killed him. A somewhat more complete draft, still lacking an ending, was discovered in 1971 and hammered into stageable form by Alan Simpson, one of Behan’s many biographers and the original producer of the playwright’s masterpiece, The Quare Fellow.

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The trouble is that the play is all but unplayable. The prostitutes need to be kept shallow and puppetlike–but Behan gives them the foreground so much that they pretty much have to be humanized. Cronin, Behan’s stand-in, needs to occupy the center of the play, but Behan left little more than a sketch of the character. The play demands a sure sense of tone; it has to drift back and forth between absurdism and low comedy, gradually building up our sense that there’s something appalling in Cronin’s (and Behan’s) humorous disengagement from events.