Hostages to Fortune

Among the radical departures in a new staging of Frank O’Connor’s Guests of the Nation, presented as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival, is an all-female cast.

This somehow accentuates the awfulness of the central event in O’Connor’s 1931 short story, involving two pairs of soldiers who feel no enmity but are condemned by circumstances to their different fates.

Speaking of departures, and in keeping with the company’s tradition, the Corcadorca production is a mobile one. It starts in the Cork Opera House, where cast and actors spent the first part of the show huddled together into the dimly lit back rows of the balcony.

From this safe house we all then trek across the city centre to the Triskel Arts Centre, the courtyard of which deputises for a lonely bog.

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Here, we know, Privates Hawkins and Belcher are due to meet their ends, although as O’Connor’s narrator Bonaparte explains in the original, hostages and captors both persist to the last in hoping for an escape:

“We walked along the edge of [the bog] in darkness, and every now and then Hawkins would call a halt and begin all over again, as if he was wound up, about our being chums, and I knew that nothing but the sight of the grave would convince him that we had to do it. And all the time I was hoping that something would happen, that they’d run for it or that [another IRA man} Noble would take over the responsibility from me.”

When mentioning O’Connor’s story here some weeks ago (Diary April 22nd), I suggested it was in part inspired by the real-life example of Major Geoffrey Lee Compton-Smith, whose stoical death during the War of Independence had a profound effect on his captors and even on the Free State government.

In fact, as I have since been reminded, there are other, closer parallels in the history of their period. Frank O’Connor himself claimed the story was suggested by a conversation he overheard between two IRA men, discussing the execution of two British soldiers, while he was an anti-Treaty internee during the Civil War.

That conversation in turn may have been based on either of two real incidents, one in East Kerry, the other in West Cork. The latter involved a pair of soldiers from the Essex Regiment, Percy Taylor and Thomas Watling, in whose fate one John L O’Sullivan (1901 – 1990), later a Fine Gael TD, became mixed up.

Watling and Taylor were held for a time in O’Sullivan’s family home, long enough for his mother to grow fond of them and try to save their lives. O’Sullivan himself refused an order to shoot them, but it seems that one of his older brothers eventually did the job instead.

Another of those said to have been present was a Dan Harte, from Clonakilty, who felt strongly that the condemned men should be given the chance to say a last prayer and was disturbed by a soldier’s atheistic refusal to accept.

This descended into bleak humour, as recorded in one second-hand account, when Harte complained to the intended victim: “Blast you man, haven’t you got a soul?” to which the soldier pointed at the underside of his boot and punned: “That’s the only sole I’ve got.”

As for O’Sullivan, recalling his own part in the event 60 years later, he summed up: “The revulsion of taking a human life goes very deep in a person.”

Whatever the original inspiration, O’Connor’s story of captors and captives bonding inconveniently is a recurring one in Irish literature and film, reprised by Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game.

Kevin Barry’s rewrite for Corcadorca, meanwhile, has Belcher echo the words of Compton-Smith, who in a last letter to his wife pledged he would die “like an Englishman and a soldier”.

But as well as being all-female, the cast (Gina Moxley, Amy Conroy, Liz Fitzgibbon, and Chloe O’Reilly) speak only in Irish accents, emphasising the common humanity of those involved and the randomness of their ordained roles.

Adding another strange twist to the original, the closing narration is read by a South African poet, Neo Gilson, Corcadorca’s current artist-in-residence, although even in her outsider’s voice, Bonaparte’s sad epiphany remains unchanged:

“…with me it was as if the patch of bog where the Englishmen were was a million miles away […] and I was somehow very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow. And anything that happened to me afterwards I never felt the same about again.”