The Celtic Twilight

IN OUTLINING his moral code. Brendan Behan said" I respect kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law: I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer." By this point in his life, 1959. Behan had mellowed considerably, the former impassioned rebel who, twenty years earlier-as a sixteen-year old member of the Irish Republican Army-was arrested in Liverpool for the possession of explosives, had long dispensed with his plans for blowing up British battleships. Instead of violent action, he turned to art to express his beliefs.

When he wrote The Hostage in 1958. Behan appealed to human kindness to make himself understood. The Hostage pulls off a rare dramatic teat: it's "political" without being heavy-handed, a message play that doesn't succumb to self-righteous moralizing. It takes place in a Dublin brothel where I.R.A. officers hold an eighteen-year-old British soldier hostage in reprisal for one of their own men who awaits hanging in a Belfast jail, Irish. The whorehouse-declaimed by society as a sinful place-is inhabited by a gang of cheerful, extremely humane eccentries who live by their own particular moral code. Acutely aware of Ireland's volatile political atmosphere, they (with a few exceptions), nevertheless refuse to obsess themselves with politics. Several of them differ in race, nationality, class, and sexual preference, yet they express little prejudice. When the British prisoner enters their happy abide, the whorehouse tenants-to the outrage of the I.R.A. captors treat him with warmth and sympathy, their simple compassion out-weighs the national and religious biases that perpetuate the war.

Behan, though, felt that The Hostage seemed contrived. Drawing from the music hall tradition of entertainment, the play includes songs and dances that serve more to keep the audience amused than to accelerate the plot or enhance a theme. In an awkward second act scene, the actors break character, joke about the author, and have a little party onstage. It's strange interlude that seems merely thrown in to break up the play's growing tension and fails to fit into The Hostage's overall scheme.

There are several bright moments in James Bundr's production of The Hostage, some flashes of terrific talent and intelligence. Yet the production's general tone is muddled, its overall effect anesthetizing. Perhaps, Behan's mixture of music hall exuberance and potent anti-war commentary threw Bundy for a loop. An odd sense of uncertainly pervades many scenes, making for an intriguing but unsatisfying evening of theater.

BEFORE THE FIRST LINE of dialogue is spoken. Bundy's The Hostage assumes a peculiar vaguely confused tone. The curtain rises on the delapidated lodging house: a light-haired woman stands beside a piano, waving to the audience. As she sits at the piano and begins to play. The company comes onstage and dances a jig. Their steps are careful. Scrupulously well-executed: you can see the concentration on their faces, in their wide alert eves, in their lips that move softly as they count the beats. The tinny sound of the piano and the gently pitter-pat of shoes upon the set's wooden-board floor echo through the house. Occasionally, one of the more confident dancers lets out a strained cheer or cutious exclamation. The footwork is fascinating, but so lacking in cluberance that it seems more like an exercise than a dance. This jig-perfectly executed vet perfectly lifeless-sets the mood for almost the entire production.

At times-Bundy displays a solid understanding of Behan's work, but, constantly, he falters. He interweaves the different themes and sub-plots with careful grace, but a bit too meticulously. Bundy's self-conscious style gives The Hostage an inappropriate solemnity. The frequent wisecracking of Behan's characters-their defense against despair and such horrors of the Modern Age as the H. bomb-loses all its verve as the director has his actors take long. Thoughtful pauses between too many lines. He dilutes the strength of many of the songs by having them performed like dirges. When the company joins together for a song. Bundy has them scattered around the stage, standing motionless like figures in Madame Trousseau's, staring out at the audience and singing in low. Steady voices. In their dry, funeral quality, the group songs recall the opening jig.

Almost every technical element of The Hostage is relentlessly straightforward, from Jon Monderer's unobtrusive lighting design to Bundy's simple blocking. Chris Clemenson's set, while extremely well-crafted, poses a major problem for the show. High stacks of appropriately beat-up furniture and clutter surround a vast, empty space, thus forcing almost all action center-stage. When actors deliver their lines from near the bed that stands upstage they are sometimes inaudible and seem miles away, "swallowed up" by that infamous monster, the Loeb Mainstage.

The production gains its only vigor. Its spasmodic brightness, from the cast members, most of whom deliver very fine performances. As pat, the punchy cynical caretaker of the house. Brian McCue is quite good, but, as in many of his past performances, the seams show. There's a "stagey" quality to his limp, his wry grin, his extravagant gestures: one can see too clearly the thought behind every inflection, perhaps. McCue hoped to play upon Behan's theme of dramatic distance, to make the audience sharply conscious of the fact that they are in a theater viewing a performance. Unfortunately, his characterization only reflects the dull spontaneity of Bundy's directional style. McCue, as always, takes stronghold of the audience's interest, but he fails to excite us.

Jeanne Affelder is excellent as Meg Dillon., the feisty madame of the whorehouse. With admirable restraint. Affelder gives Meg a touching quality of tarnished dignity. While her early verbal jousts with McCue lack the necessary sarcastic edge, her climatic argument with him in the third act beautifully reveats Meg's reluctant tenderness. As Lestile, the young British hostage. Nick wyse finds the right balance of cynicism and naivete. Like the tenants of the lodging he loves his country, but he doesn't fully comprehend the war-especially when confronted with the possibility of his own execution. Wyse captures Leslie's confusion and terror without forcing the pathos of his plight Holley Stewart makes Teresa a complex and full blooded variation on the ancient virgin-where theme.

John Belluci. A. Lorean O. Neill. and Daphnede Marneffe each give wonderful comic characterizations as the whorehouse's resident fanatics, both patriotic and religious. Belluci's powerful voice highlights his character's arrogant pomposity. While de Marneffe and O'Neill display a quirky slimness that is hugely funny.

Although Bundy's production is, at times, tiresome, and almost always, frustrating, there are enough of those quick brilliant flourishes-when the fine acting enhances the other elements of the show to create a whole, coherent moment of enticing theater- to sustain an audience for three acts. What this version of the Hostage lacks in exuberancd, it makes up for in its faithful rendering of Behan's sincerity and sensitivity.