The Hostage (Style)

Style

Setting

Behan’s play is set in a run-down lodging house in Dublin. The lodging house was originally rented by Monsewer to be a safe-house for IRA soldiers on the run. However, financial constraints forced Monsewer and Pat to open the house to other people, to “all sorts of scruffy lumpers.” Behan was a poet of the working-class, and he made working-class dialogue and character his forte. The setting allows him to run the gamut of characters and to exploit the comedic resources of such types. But Behan’s decision is not a purely practical one: the brothel-cum-lodging house has rich symbolic resonance.

Maureen Waters has argued in The Comic Irishman that Behan’s decision to set the play in a lodging house and a brothel demonstrates the denigration of Pat and Monsewer’s Republican idealism and, indeed, of the “old Republican ideal.” It might be more accurate to say that the setting represents the Treaty’s prostituting of Ireland Michael Collins’s decision to “sell” the six counties to England in exchange for peace in the Republic. But this reading is only persuasive if one imposes one’s own feelings about prostitution upon Behan’s, and there is little evidence to suggest that Behan was judgmental about the occupation. His characterizations of prostitutes are in fact reasonably sympathetic. The setting may suggest the radical possibilities of Republicanism: that its emphasis upon the unification of Ireland and its socialist platform should mean, logically, that it reaches out to embrace society’s “undesirables.”

The Songs

Behan and Littlewood shared a delight in music-hall theater, and the bawdy, comic music-hall songs in The Hostage and their more somber Irish counterparts are an essential part of the play. The songs cue the audience to mood changes; they develop themes in lyrics rather than in action; and they provide thumb-nail character sketches more efficiently and entertainingly than expository prose.

Each act contains a mixture of songs: Act One, which begins with an Irish jig, includes Irish songs about the War of Independence and the assassination of Michael Collins; Act Two includes Meg’s poignant and bitter song about the Easter Uprising, as well as Monsewer’s celebration of the British aristocracy and Leslie’s racist, patriotic chant; and the last Act includes a similar range of songs, one of which celebrates “queer” sexuality and another the beauty of “Irish eyes.” This mixed bag of goods is as eclectic as the inhabitants of the Dublin lodging house; each song proves to be more revealing about the singer than their dialogue.

From Pat’s first song about an IRA victory over the Black and Tans during the War of Independence, the audience realizes that his Republicanism, which he has only moments ago dismissed as “long over, finished and done with,” is in fact alive and well, albeit rooted in the past rather than in the present. Behan offers Pat’s relish in the IRA victory — “And the Irish Republican Army/Made shit of the whole mucking lot” — as one side of the Republican movement. Contrasting to it a few minutes later is Meg’s romanticized Republicanism, with all its associated valorization of blood sacrifice and suffering, represented in her lament for Michael Collins: “Ah, curse the time, and sad the loss my heart to crucify/Than an Irish son, with a rebel gun, shot down my Laughing Boy. . . . My princely love, can ageless love do more than tell to you. . . . For all you did and would have done, my enemies to destroy.”

Pat and Meg’s songs — and their characters — represent the two different sides of Republicanism who divided politically over Partitioning: Pat followed De Valera and joined the rebels fighting against the Treaty, but Meg’s sympathies are with Collins. Thus Behan’s inclusion of songs cues the audience into the political differences between Pat and Meg, into the complexities of modern Irish history, while building up, through the references to violence, tragic loss, and death, an atmosphere suggestive of impending loss.

The songs are not simply used in these ways, though; they are also very much part of Behan and Littlewood’s conscious use of “alienation” effects. One of the best examples of the complex results of such techniques is the songs that Leslie sings. Leslie, as “the hostage,” is the focus of much attention in the play, both from the characters and the audience. The residents seek him out because they are curious about him, and likewise the audience’s attention is glued upon him whenever he is on-stage. Who is this young soldier? Does he deserve to die? Can he redeem himself in Irish eyes? Behan and Littlewood deliberately undercut the growing sympathy and empathy for Leslie at the end of Act Two. Meg’s swelling chant about the sacrifice of the Easter Uprising celebrates Irish courage, condemns British cruelty, and asserts an undefeated rebel spirit. It is an impressive, passionate, and moving performance. Bare minutes later, it is Leslie’s turn to sing. He has just learned he may well die. But rather than exploiting this moment for all it is worth — rather than capitalizing upon the audience’s sympathy for Leslie — Behan hands him a song that slaps that sympathy in the face and, in all probability, alienates the audience altogether. ’I am a happy English lad, I love my royal-ty. . . . But I wish the Irish and the niggers and the wogs/Were kicked out and sent back home.”

Behan and Littlewood’s use of music-hall style songs for satiric purposes is best illustrated by comparison of Mulleady and Miss Gilchrist’s songs in Act Three. The first song, sung by Mulleady, Rio Rita, and Princess Grace, cheerfully and defiantly proclaims “we’re here because we’re queer . . . we’re queer because we’re here.” The underlying joke about this song is that the “queerness” is not limited to sexuality — the three men are secret policemen, and their “odd couple” union proves that political expediency can unite the most apparently opposed people, just as sexuality can be a bridge across all sorts of class and racial differences. Contrasting to this is Miss Gilchrist and Leslie’s cheery music-hall style song, whose cheery tone and rhythm contrasts ironically to its grimly satiric subject. The pious Miss Gilchrist asks in a shocked voice whether Leslie would sponge off “women’s earnings,” to which the disaffected working-class Leslie replies contemptuously that he would: “I’m fed up with pick and shovel/And I’d like to try it once.” Whether their topics are middle-class morality or social mores about sexuality and gender, Behan and Littlewood use the music-hall style songs to great effect to entertain their audience with strong satire.