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'The Hostage' for Griffin Theatre: A radical, bawdy, dangerous bit o' Behan By Chris Jones In the late 1950s, the Irish genius Brendan Behan, who spent many of his formative years in prison, collaborated with the great populist English director, Joan Littlewood. The result was an English-language production of “The Hostage,” a play about the troubles that Behan had first penned in Irish. The show, which moved to Broadway, is regarded by theater historians as one of the seminal creations of the post-war era and a radical, bawdy, passionate, dangerous piece of theater that smashed conventional alliances, shattered traditional notions of Irish lyricism, and revealed the cost and absurdity of war with clarity comparable to Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage.” If you ever say the roughly contemporaneous movie “The Entertainer,” Laurence Olivier’s masterwork, you’ll have a sense of the style. “The Hostage” is set in a wacky Dublin whorehouse and revolves
around the IRA’s abduction of a young British soldier in response
to the slated execution of a young Irish boy held in a Belfast prison.
It is very rarely produced. Here’s why. This intentionally alienating
three-act show requires a huge cast, contains broad swaths of what
one might charitably call meandering writing, reveals both English
and Irish warts aplenty, and requires the adoption of a very complicated
theatrical style that interlaces serious scenes with music-hall
songs, farcical spoofery with painful realism, gorgeous poetry with
crass pastiche. But this Anglo-Irish cultural polyglot—as imagined
through the bottom of a bottle—is also a brilliantly inventive play.
Behan was a dramatic poet of the first order. It’s just that it
is almost impossible to stage him in a fully satisfactory way. This is by no means a perfect production. Oh no. At Saturday night’s show, the difficult but crucial transitions between styles were nowhere near sharp or devastating enough. Caricature trumped truth too often. Punches were pulled. And a lack of clear directorial and actorly focus in places made some sections hard to follow. But I still thought this was one of gutsiest productions I’ve seen in months, and in a strange but powerful way, it manages to channel a lot of the messy brilliance that Behan represented. If, like me, you’re a fan of the man’s work, I wouldn’t miss it. Berry and his crew get the most crucial scenes right. Although you struggle to hear him at times, Eamonn McDonagh’s understated Pat (the sardonic emcee of the whole thing) is an authentic creation. And the all-important romance between the scared-kid soldier (earnestly played by Rob Fenton) and his young Irish girlfriend (the dead-on Nora Fiffer) is both real and intensely haunting. Unfortunately, Berry hasn’t yet found a way to make the comic IRA guards and whorehouse characters both credible and ridiculous (they’re just ridiculous), but Donna McGough (who plays matriarch Meg) finds the right tone, and there are times when other performers catch your laughter and send it back down your throat, as Behan intended. Don’t take this recommendation if your idea of appealing Irish drama involves baggy sweaters, stone floors and comforting nostalgia. Behan, who was dead by 1964 from all that booze and trouble, had no time for any of that.
"He's held captive in Dublin brothel" Griffin play never slows down
The boardinghouse (and its lewd cousin, the brothel) have always been great backdrops for storytelling. Just think of Studs Terkel (who grew up in a Chicago boardinghouse), or novelist Thomas Wolfe (whose mother rented out rooms), or Christopher Isherwood (whose tales about a particular Berlin apartment complex eventually morphed into the world of "Cabaret"). Brendan Behan, the Irish poet-playwright who was both a youthful revolutionary and a legendary drinker (he died in 1964 at the age of 41), also used a boardinghouse-turned-brothel in Dublin as the setting for one of his most famous works, "The Hostage," now getting a rip-roaring production by Griffin Theatre, the terrific company that rarely gets the attention it so fully deserves. And his play with music -- a raucous, Brechtian-style satire about the absurdity of war, the lunacy of the military, the inconsistency of religion and the fleeting nature of love -- turns those bustling living quarters into a place where everyone can join in singing an irony-tinged ditty that proclaims: "There's no place on Earth like the world." The Griffin production, with a cast of 15 actors and four first-rate musicians led by pianist Pat King, has been directed by Jonathan Berry, a major Chicago talent who, despite a series of sensational productions in recent years, remains a bit under the radar. Berry possesses a grand gift for illuminating complex plays, and for creating a tight ensemble spirit among large casts who invariably generate a vibrant, organic, "lived-in" feeling on stage. The finer political points of Behan's play are detailed in dramaturg
Stefka Mihaylova's excellent program notes. Suffice it to say here
that the story begins as a young IRA activist (never seen) is being
held by the British in Belfast. Before long, a handsome 19-year-old
Englishman, Private Leslie Williams (Rob Fenton, ideally fresh-faced,
hapless and charming) is taken hostage by the IRA, and is held in
the busy brothel run by Meg (the ever sharp Donna McGough) and Pat
(Eamonn McDonagh, a velvet-voiced singer) -- with the hope that
a prisoner exchange might be worked out. Meanwhile, the many characters
in the Dublin house get to act out and reveal a few things about
human nature. They include Teresa (the beguiling Nora Fiffer, an
actress who bears close watching), the convent-educated maid who
falls for Leslie; Monsewer (Rom Barkhordar, aptly eccentric and
droll), a kilt-wearing fellow of questionable identity; the mock,
holier-than-thou nutcase, Muleady (Jason Lindner) and his lusty
partner, Miss Gillchrist (the funny, power-voiced Sara Sevigny);
a bevy of prostitutes, and a lanky volunteer played by lanky Ryan
Borque, a fleet physical comic. |
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