Paris, 1948: two broken individuals, a world forever changed

Abstract On the 15th arrondissement in Paris, Irish playwrights Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett meet for the first time. Beckett, having spent the Second World War working for the French Resistance and having narrowly escaped the hands of the Gestapo, is tormented by the randomness of the universe’s selection. He is left to survive in a world with ‘humanity in ruins’. Why has he been saved when many of his friends and colleagues have not been so lucky? Behan, a month out of Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison having spent most of his short life since the age of sixteen incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for terrorist activities, has his own demons to exorcise. From this encounter between two broken individuals, art will make sense of a world forever changed. A few weeks after their fateful meeting, Beckett begins writing his masterpiece, Waiting for Godot. Behan, by all accounts, arrived in Paris with a rough draft of his anti-hero classic, The Quare Fellow. Here, at last, long lost film footage has surfaced to put an end to speculation of what might have been discussed during that long night in the attic studio of number six, rue des Favorites, in Paris, 1948.