"Hostage" today needs a total restitching

THE talk of "putting on a play" as if a piece of theatre was an off the peg outfit, sitting in the wardrobe of repertoire, waiting to be dusted down and worn. But the metaphor is misleading, and never more so than in the case of Brendan Behan's The Hostage.

What we have is not a play text but merely the record of a production, an indication in print of what happened when Joan Littlewood staged a play in the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in October 1958. Kenneth Tynan noted at the time that "no one can be sure how much of the dialogue is pure Behan and how much is gifted embroidery." By now, not just the embroidery but all the seams of the piece need to be, restitched. Otherwise, it just won't wear.

The fascination of the play lies, in the very choice that Behart made when he allowed his little Gaelic melodrama, An Giall (no more than an extended one act sketch), to be transformed into The Hostage. To put it another way, the most profound critique of the IRA in the play, the real break that Behan makes, lies not in the content of the play but in its form.

The plot - Republicans kidnap young English soldier and glimpse the futility and inhumanity of their own assumptions in the cruelty of killing him - was written in the 1930s, by Frank O'Connor. Behan adds nothing in the way of emotional or moral insight to O'Connor's Guests Of The Nation, What is original and important is the way in which that plot is placed in an entirely different cultural context.

Guests Of The Nation and An Giall may raise questions about the political and moral assumptions behind militant Irish nationalism, but they leave its cultural assumptions untouched. Both remain firmly within the Irish literary movement; the attempt to create a separate and distinctive cultural space. But The Hostage as re invented by Littlewood and Behan, destroys the cultural assumptions as well.

It depends on the idea that the popular vulgarities at vaudeville are as much at home in Dublin as they are in London. It suggests that the British soldier's Old Kent Road is not much different from the old IRA man's Russell Street. It shows that Ireland is not a pure place in any sense of the word, that it is sexually heterogeneous and culturally promiscuous.

And, above all, it makes a choice for the here and now instead of for tradition and posterity. Where An Giall, is trying to place itself within a literary tradition, to win a place in a national cultural canon, The Hostage is, above all, live theatre, reckless of past and future, concerned only with what can happen between actors and an audience at any given point in time. That choice is where the play's real politics lie. By choosing the here and now, the contingent, the living, over the long view, the dead generations, and the abstract future, it challenges most profoundly the Republican belief that the present can be sacrificed on the altar of history.

In doing this, it presents a director with a stark choice - either reinvent it and make it truly a live event, or don't do it at all. Brian Brady, who directs the Abbey pro duct ion, seems fully aware of this choice. But he also seems too timid to really make it. His production starts, and continues for a while, as if it were going to be bold and radical. But it lacks the courage of its convictions.

One sign of the timidity is that the action is moved forward, but only to 1962, as if the director wishes to acknowledge the need to shift the play out of its original context but is afraid to do so in a way that would make any real difference. Likewise, contemporary references - white ribbons, peace talks - are interpolated, but in a way that is so marginal that the effect is almost invisible. And Brendan Conroy's IRA officer is still a comic and absurd figure, as, if a 1996 Dublin audience knew no more about such things than a 1958 London audience might have done.

There are good things in the production. It is mostly well cast, and it has in Donal Donnelly and Barbara Brennan two performers, who, if they have no opportunity for great art here, at least display great craft. Robert Price as the English soldier and Janet Moran as the country girl who falls for him both have the sophistication it takes to play naive characters well. Tony Flynn manages, amazingly, to lift the male prostitute Rio Rita out of the dated cliche's in which he is written. And even if the songs in many way the glory of the piece - are truncated and butchered, David Hayes's musical arrangements subtly re invent the tunes.

But there are also bad things, not the least of them that there is a gaucheness about the approach to the play's exuberant vaudeville, a vague but unmistakable embarrassment about the vulgar, unsubtle directness that is what it's all about. The contingent humanity at the piece is still put on and, like any borrowed garment, it comes apart at the seams.