BRENDAN Behan's An Giall was a better drama than the entertainment which emerged under Joan Littlewood's tutelage, titled The Hostage. And The Hostage was a better entertainment than the original play. Brian Brady's new production falls somewhere between the two. It seems to yearn in mood for the original drama while including the vaudevillean elements of the entertainment. But the vaudeville lacks punch while the drama lacks characterisation and narrative impetus. It does, however, catch very well for the times we live in Behan's substantial humanitarian ambivalence between the republican cause and the murderous manner in which it was pursued.
Significantly and necessarily updated from the Littlewood version, yet not fully back to the dramatic simplicity of the 1950s original play, it sits uneasily as a piece of theatre which seems uncertain of where and what it might be not least in its claim to be set in 1962. Donal Donnelly's circuitous and elaborate Pat, the keeper of the brothel in which the IRA choose to house a young British army hostage to be shot in the event that a republican prisoner in a Belfast prison is executed, is the performance that best catches the Behan ambivalence, its depth echoed only in Barbara Brennan's portrayal of Pat's wife Meg (ambivalent for wholly different reasons).
The rest are doomed in this production to remain uneasily in the limbo between character and caricature. Des Cave's Monsewer is strong as the eccentric Englishman who has chosen to identify with the republican cause yet yearns for cricket in an English summer. Clinton Blake's Princess Grace and Tony Flynn's Rio Rita are too subdued within the drama to make the necessary music hall impact, white Derry Power's Mr Mulleady and Fidelma Cullen's sociable worker are lost in the murk of uncertainty which marks, to whole production.
Brendan Conroy's inept IRA officer is a good old fashioned caricature set unconvincingly into the effort to maintain a dramatic construction, while Annie Ryan's Colette is a lively and persuasive whore who, given the script and interpretation, can have no significance. Worst of all, the scenes between Theresa (Janet Moran), the innocent maidservant who falls for the hostage, and Leslie (Robert Price), the hostage himself, are not given enough delicacy or space to make their touching points.
Jamie Vartan's elaborate setting owes more to New Orleans than to Dublin architecture, and Cindy Cummings's choreography, notwithstanding its opening effort to echo a post 1962 Riverdance, lacks energy and cohesion. The overall impression is of a production floundering in the uncertainty of what to do with a work that was over rated in both its original melodramatic form and in its subsequent adaptation for the vaudevillean tastes of Littlewood's Stratford East.
