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Brighton Fringe Festival
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Kathleen lived through The Easter Rising, Spanish Flu, the War of Independence and the Civil war.
She took an active role in the fight for an Irish Republic and threw her energy into trying to make it a socialist one. She survived near starvation and grinding poverty, holding her family of seven children together through thick and thin while never relinquishing her innate feminism. Her ‘golden boy’ Brendan, become famous all over the world for his plays and books and ’rowdy behaviour.’ Through it all she kept going with laughter, songs and wit.
In her 92nd year, in the early 1980s, Kathleen’s son Brian (Janet’s father) made recordings of her memories. Around the same time she recorded some of the ballads and rebel songs of her youth. The memories became a book, Mother of the All the Behans, and the songs an LP, When All the World is Young. Using Kathleen’s words and favourite songs along with her own memories of her grandmother, Janet Behan and director Jessica Higgs have created a powerful and endearing portrait of a woman who witnessed, first hand, the birth of a nation.