New Play on Broadway

The Hostage (by Brendan Behan) seems much less a play than a dramatization of its playwright: sprawling, shocking, howlingly off-key, marvelously in tune, humane and hilarious. What story there is turns on a young English soldier held as a hostage in a Dublin brothel against the Belfast hanging of an Irish patriot. Under Joan Littlewood's brilliant direction, this proves story enough to provide a real center of feeling among all the vaudeville tricks, freak-show tactics, music-hall gags and ditties that stuff out the evening. As the whores and queers and strangies cavort, as irreverent lyrics make butts of everything, as wisecracks tumble out brightly ("The worst thing about jail is the other Irish patriots who are in along with you") or breezy and old ("Vat 69--that's the Pope's telephone number"), it's easy to make too little of The Hostage, to call it mere tongue-in-cheekiness, a jolly but self-indulgent romp. And as, amid shenanigans, there comes a sudden stab to the heart or a surface shot that plumbs the depths, it is perhaps easy to make too much of it, to find its anarchic flings an assay of an ill-governed world, its rancid taste an assault on respectability. Less than a philosopher and more than a buffoon, Behan is chiefly an insatiable human being. He is no one's cup of tea who recoils from finding it sloshed into a saucer, no one's humorist who, for being outraged, can't be amused. If his people often have the rackety mirth of Burns's Jolly Beggars, and the cynical morality--

Let them cant about decorum,

Who have character to lose--

Behan, like Burns, is their humanely uncorked and uncanting fellow sinner. And in its tousled way, his stage piece is thoroughly good fun.

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