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Product Description
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 a RUC 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 Iin Dublin, owned by a former IRA commandant. The hostage of the title is Leslie Williams, a young and innocent British soldier taken hostage at the border with the North 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 from Longford, resident of the house. Both are orphans living foreign to the city they find themselves in, and 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 Garda bullets.
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 WW1, the play Oh What A Lovely War.
Edgewear to the spine, LOTS of pencil notes and emendations to text pages. A reading copy.
