HOSTAGE

Monsewer and Leslie reminisce about dear old England.
Being a Dubliner myself, and a great fan of Behan, I was intrigued to see how this very Dublin play would travel to the Australian stage. After seeing it, all I can say is that if NIDA had one big collective hand I would shake it, vigorously! The production was fantastic. Michael Maher, in one of his pieces for Talent Unplugged, talks about the 'tingle factor' - "that moment when you get shivers down your spine," well I experienced a few of them during this production.

The play is set in the Sixties in the Dublin tenement home of Pat, a veteran of the Irish Rebellion with a wounded leg (the story of how he 'lost his leg' in battle differs completely every time he tells it!). Pat runs his home as a bordello, with the strangest assortment of prostitutes you ever saw, and has a couple of lodgers too - Mr Mulleady, a puny civil servant type, and Monsewer, an eccentric English, Oxford educated, born again Irish rebel, who fought alongside Pat in 1916 and is now one sandwich short of a picnic.

Things roll along nicely enough until word comes from IRA headquarters that they want to use Pat's home as a hiding place for an English soldier that they are about to capture and use as a bargaining tool for the reprieve of a convicted eighteen year old IRA bomber who is due to be executed.

The IRA capture Leslie, a nineteen year old English private, and bring him as a prisoner to Pat's. He is an amiable Cockney lad who knows nothing of politics and gets on well with the weird assortment of people living there. Himself and Pat's young housekeeper, Teresa, fall for each other but this romance looks doomed as the IRA have issued a statement to say that if their young volunteer is executed in prison the following morning as planned, then they will kill the English soldier. The play builds up to a tense and explosive ending that will have people on the edge of their seats.

This is the first NIDA production I have seen and I am very impressed. The quality and comfort of the theatre, the imaginative set design and effects, and the extremely high quality of acting and singing are the equal of any fully professional theatre company that I have seen. (Incidentally, the last NIDA production of this play, twenty years ago, featured a young Mel Gibson).

Josh Quong Tart turned in a performance of comic genius as Monsewer, the half mad, bagpipe playing, upper class English romantic rebel. Irish history has been littered with characters like this who saw, in the bloodshed and waste of young life, something beautiful and poetic. The irony of this romantic fool is highlighted when he becomes nostalgic for England while talking to the young captive and sings a hilarious song lauding all things upper class and English. It is a wonderful parody of the type of 'noble freedom fighter' whose mind is more in the clouds than in the blood soaked gutters, and Josh Quong Tart played this character brilliantly. I think Behan himself would have revelled in his performance.

Another comic performance that bowled me over was that of Matthew Whittet as Mr. Muleady. How an Australian could have such an understanding of this type of weedy Irish civil servant is beyond me. He played the part flawlessly and with an inspired madness that had me doubled over with laughter.

Sarah Aubrey turned in a notable performance as the young Teresa. She played the part with the gentleness and subtle understatement that it required and her singing was so delicate it would have melted the heart of Genghis Khan.

Ben Mortley brought a similar breath of reality to his part as the young happy-go-lucky Cockney teenager who, in a perfect world, would have been running free on the Old Kent Road instead of captive among strangers with a death sentence over his head.

In the cab on the way home from the theatre, our cabbie, who was Bangladeshi, upon hearing that I was Irish, asked me if I knew of Bobby Sands (a famous IRA man who died in prison while on hunger strike). I told him that everyone in Ireland knows of Bobby Sands and then told him that a cynic had recently argued with me that Bobby Sands didn't starve to death by choice but was forced to by IRA pressure, as nothing serves 'the cause' as well as a martyr. Our Bangladeshi cabbie, in his eternal wisdom, said: "It doesn't matter why he died, what matters is that he is dead." - and that is 'The Hostage' in a nutshell.

Tickets $18/$12 Concession. For bookings call (02) 9266 4800

David Cotter