The Hostage (play)

The Hostage is a loose 1958 English version, with songs, adapted in a much longer text from a one-act Irish language play An Giall, by its author, Brendan Behan.

The Hostage depicts the events leading up to the planned execution of an 18-year-old IRA member in a Belfast jail, accused of killing an Ulster policeman. Like the protagonist of The Quare Fellow, the audience never sees him. The action of the play is set in a very odd house of ill-repute on Nelson Street, Dublin, owned by a former IRA commandant. The hostage of the title is Leslie Williams, a young and innocent Cockney British soldier taken at the border with Northern Ireland and held in the brothel, brought among the vibrant but desperately unorthodox combination of prostitutes, revolutionaries and general low characters inhabiting the place.

During the course of the play, a love story develops between Leslie and Teresa (a young girl, resident of the house). Both are orphans living foreign to the city they find themselves in, Teresa being from Ballymahon, County Longford. During this Teresa promises never to forget him.

The play ends with news of the hanging in Belfast and armed Gardaí raid the brothel. Leslie is killed in the ensuing gunfight, by police bullets. In the finale his corpse rises and sings "The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling".

The play has a large cast of over 13 characters with the Irish characters representing different facets of Irish nationalism. In their comic representations, they express Behan's dislike for different aspects of Nationalist, Catholic, Republican Ireland's vision of itself by the late 1950s.

The play switches suddenly between comedy, serious political commentary and tragedy throughout its two hours. This constant change of tone is heightened further by its regular changes from prose to song, with a number of popular nationalist ballads punctuating the narrative, when sung by different cast members. In this it mirrors the music hall tradition of Dublin both pre- and post- independence and anticipates the later (1960s) British satire on the First World War, the play Oh, What a Lovely War!, created by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in 1963.

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