Hold your Hour

Today is the anniversary of the birth of one of my favourite authors, Brendan Behan.

I first came across his work when at university, a friend gave me a copy of Borstal Boy, and a few weeks later I went to see a student production of The Hostage.

Both works are incredibly individual and I would urge anyone reading this to read both and if you get a chance to see the latter or indeed his other play The Quare Fellow.

The Hostage was written in Gaelic and Behan himself translated it into English. It shows the detention, in a teeming Dublin house of ill repute, of a craftless cockney British conscript seized by the IRA as a hostage pending the scheduled execution in Belfast of an unseen IRA volunteer.

The hostage falls in love with the maid who promises not to forget him. In the end, the hostage dies accidentally during a bungled Gardai raid, shot by the police.

The main themes of the play are innocence and power, the arbitrary nature of authority, and the human cost of war.