John Brendan Keane
Keane, John B[rendan] (1928- ), playwright. Born in Listowel, he was educated by the Christian Brothers before going to Northampton, where he worked at various jobs and began to write. He returned to Listowel in 1954 and began managing a public house. His first play, Sive (1959), performed by the Listowel Drama Group, was then staged by the Southern Theatre Group, giving him a firm base in Cork when the Abbey Theatre rejected his work. Keane turned out stage successes all through the 1960s. His plays are set in the life of Co. Kerry, combining melodrama with realism. In some of them Keane manifests a strong social conscience, as in the musical Many Young Men of Twenty (1961) and Hut 42 (1962), both concerned with emigration. The Field (1965), probably his best play, depicts an obsession with the land. Big Maggie (1969) heralds a new emancipation in Irish society. Keane's nondramatic writings included The Streets and Other Poems (1961), and a series of fictional letters beginning with Letters of a Successful T.D. (1967), as well as short stories (Death Be Not Proud, 1976; Stories from a Kerry Fireside, 1980; and The Ram of God, 1991). The Bodhrán Makers (1986) concentrated his humour and independence into a best-selling novel; Durango (1992) continued in this mode. During the 1980s his plays were in new demand at the Abbey and elsewhere.
