Portrayal of Behan Suits Irishman to a T : Performance: Shay Duffin’s ‘Confessions of an Irish Rebel,’ which he has been performing for 15 years, has been praised as the ‘living image’ of the playwright.

Shay Duffin has been performing his one-man show, “Brendan Behan: Confessions of an Irish Rebel,” for more than 15 years now.

He has done his impression of the rebellious, witty and often drunk Irish playwright (whom Duffin knew from his old neighborhood in Ireland) Off-Broadway and throughout the United States. But he was at his most nervous, he said, when he did it in a theater in Dublin where Behan’s mother was in the audience.

In the show, he was wearing Behan’s clothes, which had been given to him by Behan’s widow. But he was worried about how Behan’s mother would feel about his uncompromising portrayal of the man many described as “too young to die, but too drunk to live.”

“His mother was sitting in the second row with his widow,” Duffin said on the phone from Leucadia. “I sang this song Brendan used to sing. When I finished, the audience sang it with me. Then his mother shouted out, ‘Bengy, you left out a couple of verses!’ and she started to sing them herself.”

If he had any doubts about his ability to portray Behan, he said they were put aside when Behan’s mother told him after the show, “Jesus, you’re just the image of Bengy. You even have little feet like him.”

Which helps when Duffin steps into Behan’s shoes--literally--size 7 1/2.

Duffin will bring the show to San Diego for the first time Wednesday through St. Patrick’s Day, March 17 at The La Paloma Theatre in Encinitas.

It’s happenstance that brings Duffin to San Diego.

The Actors Theatre of Nantucket, a small professional summer theater on Nantucket Island, Mass., planned to present Duffin’s show in Chicago. But Duffin was cast in a Chevy Chase movie, “Memoirs of the Invisible Man,” as the bartender. The movie was scheduled to begin production March 20 in Los Angeles. So the producing artistic director of Actors Theatre, Richard Cary, quickly scouted around for a West Coast venue and found the La Paloma, a 450-seat theater not normally known for professional productions.

Duffin said he loves the show, and he’ll “keep doing it as long as I can.”

For 16 years, at the urging of his mother, Duffin made his living as an upholsterer, which included a brush with royalty: He upholstered a toilet seat for Princess Margaret. “We all start at the bottom,” he said with a laugh.

He later worked for years as a folk singer before he heard an old interview of Behan on the radio, and it inspired him to begin jotting down notes. He ended up with more than four hours of material that he condensed down to the two that makes up this show.

As Duffin brought Behan to life, playing Behan playing 62 characters, including several from Behan’s plays, the “Brendan Behan” show brought Duffin’s acting career to life.

He recently sold an option on his movie script about Behan’s life to the producers of “My Left Foot” and “The Field.” He hopes to appear in it in a supporting role.

Duffin, 51, feels comfortable with the producers of “My Left Foot” in part because he liked the movie’s treatment of its hero, Christy Brown, who had multiple sclerosis and lived on his block.

“I carried him on my shoulders,” Behan said of Brown. “I played football with him. I’ve seen my mother and Christy’s mother go to Mass together. They cleaned up the father (in the movie). But the mother was a pure saint.”

It was in that same neighborhood where Duffin met Behan, who was 17 years his elder.

“I was afraid of him, he was such a rambunctious character,” Duffin said. And Behan, a drinker who died in 1964 at age 41 of cirrhosis of the liver, was certainly “rambunctious.”

Brought up in a family actively opposed to British rule, Behan became a courier for the Irish Republican Army as a teen-ager and later spent three years in reform school before he was sentenced to 14 years in prison (of which he served six) for an incident in which a police officer was wounded. His reform school years led to the autobiographical “The Borstal Boy,” and his tenure in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin became the setting for “The Quare Fellow,” a story about the reactions of jailers and prisoners to the hanging of a condemned man.

His most famous play, “The Hostage,” deals with an English soldier whom the IRA holds hostage in a brothel to prevent the execution of one of their own men.

Duffin was praised by The Times back in 1976 for his “quivering portrayal of the inner Behan” and for “a subtle fusion of spirits--his and Behan’s--more integrated and true than a mere portrayal, which implies an external and calculated approach.”

Duffin does like to emphasize his identification with the character. He claims to drink a pint of Guinness on stage (“I’m a teetotaler except when I’m working,” he says) and, like Behan, who campaigned for John F. Kennedy, Duffin campaigned for JFK’s nephew, Joseph Kennedy, now a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts.

He takes great pride in the fact that Samuel Beckett once told him he was “the living image of Brendan,” although Duffin himself describes the likeness as “a sack-of-potatoes look.”

And, to this day, whenever Duffin goes to Ireland, he puts flowers on the playwright’s grave.

Although as Duffin says, “he would have preferred a pint.”

“Brendan Behan: Confessions of an Irish Rebel” will run at 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays through March 17. Tickets are $14-16. At La Paloma Theatre, 471 1st St., Encinitas, 436-5774 or 1-800-79-IRISH.