Irish Studies Review
ISSN: 0967-0882 (Print) 1469-9303 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisr20
“The old cause is never dead”: hauntology and
Brendan Behan’s “The Hostage”
Ian Hickey
To cite this article: Ian Hickey (2020) “The old cause is never dead”: hauntology
and Brendan Behan’s “The Hostage”, Irish Studies Review, 28:2, 171-185, DOI:
10.1080/09670882.2020.1742461
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2020.1742461
Published online: 19 Mar 2020.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 11
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cisr20
IRISH STUDIES REVIEW
2020, VOL. 28, NO. 2, 171–185
https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2020.1742461
“The old cause is never dead”: hauntology and Brendan
Behan’s “The Hostage”
Ian Hickey
Independent Scholar, C/o Irish Studies Review, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
ABSTRACT
Brendan Behan’s “The Hostage” poses a deep critique of extreme
nationalism within an Irish context. The present article interrogates
notions of identity and history through the theoretical lens of
hauntology, first presented by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx.
The probing of the spectral, absent presences within the text show
history to repeat itself in the present through the workings of the
Derridean spectre. The villainous nature of the IRA members and
supporters, and also the victimisation of the same characters,
enables the root of their actions throughout the play to be questioned and seen to be influenced by spectral voices of the past. The
characters within the play are neither unitarily villains or victims,
but instead are villainous victims who cannot escape past ideologies and are doomed to constantly repeat the past.
KEYWORDS
Hauntology; spectres;
villains; victims; Brendan
Behan; nationalism
While on the surface Brendan Behan’s “The Hostage” subscribes to a melodrama that
shapes itself to suit the popular English music-hall style of the 1950s, beneath the surface
Behan is probing the cultural dynamics and politics that allow for a young IRA boy to be
hanged in Belfast and for a young British soldier to be kidnapped, and ultimately killed, by
the end of the play. John Brannigan suggests, and rightfully so, that “Behan’s play
engages productively with both English and Irish cultural contexts, recovering through
the character of Leslie the cultural affinities between the working classes of both cultures,
and recovering the shared hybrid cultural forms of Ireland and England through melodrama and music hall”.1 The revisionist melodrama forces the haunting presence of the
past, and memory, to become operant within the present of the play through the gross
exaggeration of the characters. In this sense, Jacques Derrida’s idea of hauntology and the
presence of spectres within the unconscious deeply resonates with Behan’s text. In
Specters of Marx, Derrida suggests that the present and future are influenced by what
he terms the spectre and that these spectres constantly return to haunt and influence the
present when he notes that “a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to comeback”.2 In the context of Derrida’s hauntology, it can be argued that the characters within
“The Hostage” are unconsciously destined to repeat the past within the present and
future. Much criticism surrounding the play has focused on “The Hostage”’s translation,
and ultimate transformation, from the Gaelic version An Giall with Joan Littlewood having
a great impact over these changes. Littlewood directed “The Hostage” and it had its first
CONTACT Ian Hickey
ianhickey91@outlook.com
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
172
I. HICKEY
showing in London at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in October 1958 with Alan Simpson
commenting that:
Joan Littlewood produced The Hostage for a London audience and coloured it in a London
way. When I came to direct the play in Gaelic for the Taibhdhearc in Galway I worked from the
English version and had the embellishments translated into Gaelic. But I related the play to
Galway, which is exactly what Joan did for London. Obviously an Irish audience could not be
expected to accept The Hostage as directed by Joan Littlewood because it did not seem true
to the Irish character. When you come to workon the play, however, you realise that this
difference is superficial.3
While there has been much contested thought on the translation of An Giall Clíona Ní
Ríordáin suggests that “it is possible to consider both An Giall and The Hostage as
consecutive, yet equally valid, manifestations of the same creative impulse”.4 The play’s
thematic output focuses on cultural hybridity, which itself is haunted by the both British
and Irish spectres, and has an approach that questions the validity of cultural and national
narratives as being wholly unitary instead of an embodiment of heterogeneity and
multiplicity.
Within Specters of Marx Derrida probes the workings of what he terms the spectre. For
Derrida, the spectre is not a physical being, but instead, it has a non-present presence.
This absent presence, or ghost, operates between the past and future to influence the
present with Derrida suggesting that “time is off its hinges, time is off course, beside itself,
disadjusted”.5 The spectre exists within the unconscious and has the ability to leave and
return bearing information from the past to haunt and influence the present and future of
any individual, culture or society. These hauntings constantly repeat themselves in the
present, albeit under different guises, with Derrida further suggesting that “we inherit the
very thing that allows us to bear witness to it”.6 The idea of inheritance is a seminal
component within the function of hauntology because all ideas and beliefs are carried by
the voice of the spectre. In terms of the characters within “The Hostage”, they all inherit
from, and are influenced by, the spectres of Irish nationalism. They are constantly haunted
by the past in both an ideological and cultural sense and cannot escape from it because
“as soon as a sign emerges, it begins by repeating itself”.7
The primary focus of the article will be on the haunting and hybrid nature of the IRA
men and women who blindly follow and propagate a life of martyrdom and bloodshed in
the name of a glorified and imagined past. Those who celebrate and are haunted by this
past fall victim to it in the end, just like the dead individuals that they mythologise and
celebrate in the name of old Ireland. Historically, within nationalist and republican
discourse it is Britain that is the enemy, and Other, of Irish nationalism for its successful
colonisation of Ireland. Britain is branded as the villain in every instance within this
discourse, however within “The Hostage” Behan flips this assumption and portrays the
IRA as being similarly villainous. Behan questions the hypocrisy and gravity of those who
are committed to celebrating an imagined past through shared struggle and makes
victims of those who neither care for, understand nor embrace this past. Paul Levitt
notes that “the old cause of the IRA is a romantic illusion, dependent on a fanatical belief
in the past and a blindness to the reality of the present. In the brothel, the unhappy
realities of the present are softened by the dreams of an idealised past”.8 The IRA
supporters within the text become victims of the very history that they celebrate and
IRISH STUDIES REVIEW
173
are haunted by. They are as much the hostages that the title suggests, and prisoners of
the past, as the kidnapped English soldier Leslie is the physical manifestation of the term
hostage.
The play is set the night before an eighteen-year old member of the IRA is due to be
hanged in Belfast Jail during the sixties. The supporters of Irish freedom from Britain and
ex-members of the IRA make up the inhabitants of the house in which the play is set.
However, the mythological status of Irish heroes is not embodied by this group of men
and women, instead they live and work in a brothel and “like the house, they have seen
better times”.9 The heroic notion of dying for one’s country, a common Republic sentiment, becomes apparent from the outset of the play when Meg notes that when the
young IRA man to be hanged received his sentence he replied with honour and courage:
“As a soldier of the Irish Republic, I will die smiling”.10 Similarly, the line of thought that
follows such moments of nationalism and resistance within the play conjures romantic
notions of revolution and freedom when Meg furthers her comments by stating that: “The
old cause is never dead. Till Ireland shall be free from the centre to the sea. Hurrah for
liberty, says the Shan Van Vocht”.11 Derrida would suggest that this is the past ideologically repeating itself in the present. Alexandra Poulain astutely recognises the altering of
the final lines of the song when she notes that in Behan “changing the final line of the
ballad from ‘Yes, Ireland shall be free’ to ‘Till Ireland shall be free,’ Meg unwittingly
undermines the assertiveness of the original song and reassigns the moment of emancipation to an indefinite future”.12 This indefinite future signals the haunting nature of the
spectre within Behan’s text as the past constantly repeats itself in the present and future:
“The subject that haunts is not identifiable, one cannot see, localize, fix any form, one
cannot decide between hallucination and perception, there are only displacements; one
feels itself looked at by what one cannot see”.13 In this sense, this is what allows the past
to constantly haunt the present of the text and for history to victimise the inhabitants of
the house. Meg’s line of thought, as well as those held by the inhabitants of the house, can
be related to those presented by Padraig Pearse in his writings prior to the 1916 Easter
Rising: “There is only one way to appease a ghost, you must do the thing it asks you. The
ghosts of a nation sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased at whatever
the cost”.14 Notions of blood sacrifice and martyrdom have been celebrated throughout
Irish history with Pearse also recounting during his oration at the graveside of Jeremiah
O’Donovan Rossa that “Ireland unfree shall never be at peace”,15 and these ghosts once
again haunt the present of the text and the characters who dwell within the brothel. There
are multiple hauntologies at work here. In changing the language of the play to English,
the play is now linguistically haunted by the language of the colonial with those in the
house who reject British culture ultimately expressing themselves through the English
language. In this sense, the cultural dynamics of the IRA men is not the selective and
motived one they choose to represent themselves as, but is instead deeply haunted by
the spectres of British identity and culture which they are so forcefully attempting to
expel, with Derrida noting that:
There are several times of the spectre. It is a proper characteristic of the spectre, if there is any,
that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future, for the
revenant, may already mark the promised return of the spectre of living being. Once again,
untimeliness and disadjustment of the contemporary.16
174
I. HICKEY
Blind unity through the past between the supporters of the IRA is further engrained within
the text when Pat automatically supports Monsewer on the grounds of having served
with him in the IRA, despite Monsewer being mentally affected and half mad: “Well I’ll
stick with him because we were soldiers of Ireland in the old days”.17 Monsewer is the
driver of many of the events that unfold in the house regarding the invitation of an IRA
officer and Volunteers who will bring the hostage captured in Armagh, Leslie, to the
house. Colbert Kearney aptly suggests that “the house is gradually felt to represent the
psychological darkness of those who inhabit it”.18 Monsewer is a victim of the very past
that allows for an eighteen-year old boy to be killed in the name of an ideology and
represents what Brannigan terms “the stubborn adherence to the nationalist cause and its
iconography of sacrifice and martyrdom”.19 These spectres permeate the unconscious of
the IRA men and women who inhabit the brothel. Monsewer is in favour of one dying in
the name of Ireland and this sacrificial sentiment further deepens the connection to the
past, but also the notion that it is this past which creates the very environment of suffering
and death that now exists in the present of the play with Derrida stating in Specters of
Marx that “a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back”.20 The fact
that aurally his name suggests a French word, monsieur, further deconstructs his fundamentalist notions of identity, while also adding to the heterogeneity of Irish identity. The
exchange that occurs between Meg, Pat and Monsewer queries and blends the haunting
nature of the past with the present of the play:
Meg: Oh, isn’t it terrible, Pat? About the poor young man. There’s to be no reprieve.
Wouldn’t it break your heart to be thinking about it?
Monsewer: It doesn’t break my heart.
Pat: It’s not your neck they’re breaking either.
Monsewer: It doesn’t make me unhappy. It makes me proud; proud to know that the old
cause is not dead yet, and that there are still young men willing and ready to go out and
die for Ireland.
Pat: I’d say that young man will be in the presence of the Irish martyrs of eight hundred
years ago just after eight o’clock tomorrow morning.
Monsewer. He will. He will. With God’s help, he’ll be in the company of heroes.21
Interestingly, despite the mythologising of the young IRA boy in Belfast and the placing of
him amongst the heroic dead of Irelands past his name is never mentioned. His absent
presence within the narrative acts as a way of juxtaposing his predicament with that of
Leslie’s and can be viewed as a hint towards the futile and unnecessary nature of the boy’s
sacrifice. This non-naming also links him, in a hauntological sense, with all those who
sacrificed themselves for Ireland and who are not remembered in contemporary times.
Similarly, it hints at Paul de Man’s notion of prosopopoeia. Prosopopeia lends a voice or
face to a dead individual or ghost and allows them to communicate and convey some
kinds of meaning upon the unconscious present. It is in the form of language that
prosopopoeia operates, because language is the vehicle by which meaning and influence
is delivered. Language allows one to form an identity and a sense of self. This is where
prosopopoeia garners the notion of a “face” formed through the “voice”, or language.
IRISH STUDIES REVIEW
175
Through the lending of a voice to a deceased individual, ghost, or Derridean spectre, one
automatically creates an identity, text or structure. De Man gifts the dead with the power
of speech and this is a notion which Derrida adopts and confers upon the spectre. In The
Rhetoric of Romanticism, de Man details prosopopoeia as:
The fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the
possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth,
eye and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the tropes name, prosopon
poien, to confer a mask or a face (prospon). Prosopopoeia is the trope of autobiography, by
which one’s names, as in the Milton poem, is made intelligible and memorable as a face.22
The trope of prosopopoeia claims that discourse is made up of voiceless figures which
when given a voice can influence the individual and create a sense of self. This links with
Derrida’s idea of hauntology because it acknowledges the voices that spring from the
past, and there are many spectral voices speaking through the characters within Behan’s
play. The young boy remains nameless despite committing his life to the IRA and Ireland.
Instead, we find out the English soldier’s name, Leslie. Naming suggests a critique of the
IRA on Behan’s part. Those who sacrifice the most are often forgotten and nameless. This
critique of those who dwell within the brothel reinforces the hybrid dynamic within the
play. It is more than just a piece produced to amuse a London audience; “The Hostage”
commits to deconstructing extreme nationalist, unitary narratives to reveal the cultural
hybridity of Ireland in the 1950s. Brannigan comments that the plays ability to address
English and Irish issues at the same time adds to its hybrid nature:
The enlargement of the play’s representation of English issues may not be simply a crude
attempt to pander to the audience, however. Arguably, The Hostage begins to represent Irish
nationalism within its system of cross-cultural representations as the paradoxical product of
certain strands within English culture. Monsewer’s particularly myopic adherence to violent
nationalism, for example, is shown to be the mirror image of empire loyalism, while the
puritanical nationalism of the IRA officer is constructed in opposition to colonial stereotypes,
and yet he behaves in exactly the same way as a colonial administrator.23
Despite being haunted by, and worshipping, the heroic past of Irish struggles against the
coloniser, many of the stories that those in the house recount are falsified and exaggerated therefore compounding the notion that they are victims of this imagined past.
Derrida also suggests that not all ghosts mean well; ideas stem from limitless places
within and outside human experience and it is here where the dangers of the spectre
remain hovering. The ghost “can always lie, he can disguise himself as a ghost, another
ghost may also be passing himself off for this one”.24 Monsewer refers to the IRA officer as
being an “Empire Loyalist”25 with the young IRA volunteer being somewhat incompetent
in his duties of guarding Leslie. The volunteer displays moments of humanity when he
offers to bring a cup of tea to Leslie at the beginning of Act Two but reverts back to his
staunch beliefs when in the company of the IRA Officer. In many respects, he is being
guided, and led by, the leadership of those above him rather than by his own beliefs
which is similar to the hierarchical structure of the British Army and also the influence of
the Derridean spectre. The Volunteer reinforces the spectral narrative that he has been
exposed to. This mirrors Leslie’s position and plight as he similarly follows orders with little
understanding of the past beliefs of those who hold him captive.
Rio Rita: Ah you murdering bastard. Why don’t you go back home to your own country.
176
I. HICKEY
Soldier: You can take me out of it as soon as you like. I never bloody-well asked to be
brought here.26
The selective nature of the inhabitants of the brothel’s memory and aspects of chosen
history signify a distinct disconnectedness between the outdated, yet glorified, IRA
struggles and the modern, hybrid society of their present. They are haunted and influenced by spectres of the past who invade their unconscious. The men and women of the
house look on proudly as a march for the boy in Belfast passes by their house in an act that
rekindles the past as well as other nations that experienced British colonialism:
Meg: Teresa – Teresa – it’s a band.
Pat: What’s going on?
Meg: They’re marching to the G.P.O over the boy that’s being hung in Belfast Jail.s
Pat: It’s like Jim Larkin’s funeral.
Volunteer: Plenty of police about.
Monsewer: By Jove, look at those banners. “Another victim for occupied Ireland”.
Meg: “England, the hangman of thousands. In Ireland, in Kenya, in Cyprus”.27
This idea of recounting certain chosen aspects of history that coincide with, and
celebrate, nationalist and republican sentiment within the play suggests that the inhabitants’ sense of self is purely imagined with Benedict Anderson noting that the nation is
merely a creation of the imagination:
[A nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and
exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for
so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.28
The members of the house are united through their sense of a heroic, united community.
However, Pat’s supposed heroic exploits during his time in the IRA are revealed for what
they truly are by Meg. On the announcement that “two guards and a prisoner”29 are to be
brought to the house the conversation that unfolds shows the true nature of those in the
house, but also the imagined, false nature of the myths they create around nationalism:
Meg: We should be proud to help the men that are fighting for Ireland. Especially that
poor boy to be hanged in Belfast Jail tomorrow morning.
Pat: Why are you getting so upset about Ireland? Where the hell were you in nineteen
sixteen when the real fighting was going on?
Meg: I wasn’t born yet.
Pat: You’re full of excuses. Where were you when we had to go out and capture our own
stuff off the British Army?
Meg: Capture it? You told me that you bought it off the Tommies in the pub. You said
yourself you got a revolver, two hundred rounds of ammunition, and a pair of Jodhpurs
off a colonel’s batman for two pints of Bass and fifty Woodbines.30
IRISH STUDIES REVIEW
177
Similarly, later in the text Pat talks of a “savage and barbarous battle” where the “town
was nothing but red fire and black smoke and the dead were piled high on the roads”.31
Once again, the exaggeration of history and the past supports the nationalist agenda of
the underdog rising up against the bigger force who had “Lewis guns, Thompsons and
landmines”,32 and simultaneously refers back to Derrida’s earlier point that the spectre
of the past is never to be trusted. This narrative trumps up, and hinders, realistic
interpretations of the past which ultimately influence the events that unfold in the
present and victimises those who conform to it. In reality, and not in the idealised
narrative put forward by Pat and those in the house, it is revealed that the only victim of
the violence in the battle was the “County Surveyor out measuring the road and not
interfering with politics one way or the other”33 with both sides seeking to claim the
dead individual as their own in a manner that drives their own political agenda against
the other side. Both sides put up memorial crosses on either side of the road for the
man and it is this that allows Behan to show the almost comical nature of the inventions
that go with nationalism. Commemoration and remembrance of past sacrifices feeds
political division with Alexandra Poulain noting that “though glorious memories of the
Easter Rising are constantly invoked, the play suggests that Irish nationalism has failed
to bring about a new era and that revolution has merely engendered a replica of past
conditions”.34 This haunting replica of the past makes victims of those in the house who
support it. They exist in a state of stasis, forever repeating the past within the walls of
the brothel while the outside world shifts and shapes itself into modernity.
The falsity of the pure Gaelic, Irish hero is further deconstructed and revealed for what
it really is by Behan within the text. Behan is quoted as having said that “the first duty of a
writer is to let his country down. He knows his own people the best. He has a special
responsibility to let them down”.35 In this sense, Behan reveals the reality of not only Irish
identity, that it is a hybrid identity, but also the identities of those who fight, suffer and die
for Ireland. Many have chosen to become Irish, per se, and have also had members of their
own families serve and fight for the British army therefore adding a juxtaposition between
their own heritage and their imagined one. It is revealed in the text that Monsewer is an
Englishman and merely “discovered he was an Irishman”36 after having been born and
educated in England: “he went to all the biggest colleges in England and slept in the one
room with the King of England’s son”.37 The hybridity of Monsewer’s identity adds to the
imagined sense of allegiance to the past that those who dwell in the house feel as well as
the non-present presence of the spectral influences that make up this identity. Language
allows for Monsewer to slightly escape the English side of his identity when Pat terms him
an Anglo-Irishman.
Meg: I’m with you he wasn’t born an Irishman. He became one.
Pat: He didn’t become one – he was born one – on his mother’s side, and as he didn’t like
his father much so he went with his mother’s people – he became an Irishman.
Meg: How did he do that?
Pat: Well he took it easy at first, wore a kilt, played gaelic football on Blackheath.
Meg: Where’s that?
178
I. HICKEY
Pat: In London. He took a correspondence course in the Irish Language. And when the
Rising took place he acted like a true Irish hero.
Meg: He came over to live in Ireland.
Pat: He fought for Ireland with me at his side.38
Just as much of the past events that are celebrated and glorified by Pat are merely
figments of his imagination, the very fact that Monsewer technically created and reimagined his identity falls into the crux of my argument in this article, that the characters
within the text are blindly led by an imagined, elevated sense of nationalism and that they
all become victims of this with Derrida further noting that “the spectre is also, among
other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects – on
an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see”.39 Pat, an ex-hero of the old IRA now
runs a Brothel. Those who inhabit the house serve as either prostitutes, customers or live
there, with Monsewer being mentally affected by his time fighting in the IRA. In an
interview with Sylvère Lotringer in 1961 Behan was questioned on whether his attitude
towards the IRA had changed from the publication of Borstel Boy to “The Hostage”:
I regard the IRA as a regrettable necessity, but it is a necessity. I must explain that I consider
some members of the IRA to be figures of fun, but if someone asked me to condemn the IRA
for an attack on a British barracks anywhere in the thirty-two counties of Ireland, I’m not
going to do it.40
While “The Hostage” animates the IRA men, and their supporters, as figures of fun; they
thematically subscribe to the music-hall, vaudeville nature of the play itself which pluralises the nature of the plays heritage; that of Irish and British origin. This allows for a
serious critique of the politics of identity to be masked by the buffoonery and ignorance
of those who inhabit the brothel. Similarly, those who inhabit the house are victims of a
past by which they are held hostage while the regimentally strict IRA officer and Volunteer
who bring Leslie to the house reveal that they too are hybrids of sorts. Despite being
devoted members of the IRA and strongly anti-British they reveal that their fathers had
served in the British army.
Meg: Ah, there’s many a good heart beats under a khaki tunic.
Volunteer: There’s something in that. My own father was in the Royal Irish Rifles.
Officer: Mine was in the Inniskillings.41
This is an extremely hybrid, dynamic moment within the play with the pluralisation of the
men’s identities springing forth from the postcolonial nature of Irish history. These
colonial hauntings multiply the different spectral voices that influence the present of
the text with Derrida stating that “‘One hears,’ Marx quotes, ‘millions of spirits speak
through the mouths of people’”.42 This furthers the hybrid nature of the text as multiple
hauntings and voices exist within the Irish psyche. The collective unconscious of the
nation is not simply the unitary version that the inhabitants of the brothel suggest, it is
instead a fluid and malleable identity. It allows Behan to show both sides of nationalism in
Ireland while also incorporating a sense of Otherness between both at the same time with
Homi K. Bhabha suggesting that cultural difference does not have to be a negative thing
IRISH STUDIES REVIEW
179
but is rather a flag of cultural identification. In The Location of Culture, he asserts that
“cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in the relation of Self to
Other”.43 Many Irish men who served in the British Army during the First World War did so
out of financial necessity but also under the hope that if they served then independence
would be granted by the British government for such a showing of loyalty. There is not
much difference between the goals of the IRA Volunteer and Officer and those of their
fathers which adds to the multifaceted nature of Irishness. Neither is lesser an Irishman
than the other with Monswer noting that “A race occurs when a lot of people live in one
place for a long period of time”,44 thereby constituting that by living in a place one
automatically become a part of that community. This assimilation of identities furthers the
crux of Behan’s argument within “The Hostage” and the imagination of heroicness
associated with being a member of the IRA. In his discussion with Rae Jeffs, Behan speaks
of the 1916 Rising:
In my childhood I could remember the whole week a damn sight better than I can now for all my
family were in the Rising. And they told the stories to such good effect that I was in there with
them. There was nothing remote about it. For the matter of that, I grew up to be rather surprised
by and condescending to any grown-up person who had not taken part in it. I was with Tom
Clarke and his 1,500 men in the Post Office when the tricolour flag went down, and I marched to
the Rotunda with them in defeat, and even heard Tom Clarke’s gleeful remark: “God it was good
to see them run”. Now I have learned enough arithmetic to know that I could not possibly have
taken part in an event which happened seven years before I was born, and it saddens me.45
This is precisely the locus of the imagined sense of self that makes victims, and villains, of
those who inhabit the house within the play but also embodies the spectral and repetitious nature of history. During his youth, Behan was deeply influenced by these stories of
the old IRA and the actions of those who took part in the Easter Rising. These narratives
seep into the unconscious which then causes polarising accounts of Irishness. Within the
play, through quick witted humour, Behan deconstructs these falsified historical accounts
through the position that the old heroes find themselves in. They worship their sacrifices
of the past but find that the present does not worship them:
Meg: Away with you.
Pat: Let alone the years I spent incarcerated in Mountjoy with the other Irish patriots, God
help me.
Meg: Ah, Mountjoy and the Curragh Camp were universities for the like of you. But I’ll tell
you one thing, and that’s not two, the day you gave up work to run this house for
Monswer and take in the likes of this lot, you became a butler, a Republican butler, a halfred footman – a Sinn Fein skivvy.46
The supposed glorious past that those who dwell within the house constantly celebrate
does not lead to a fortuitous present. Those who inhabit the house are victimised and
tortured into a state of stasis by the very past they worship.
So far the discussion has focused on the issue of victimhood in relation to the members
and supporters of the IRA within “The Hostage”, but the question must be raised in how
they can be termed villainous? They are victims of the past and of blind allegiance to an
ideology that forces young men to die for an imagined cause. The physical hostage of the
text is the young British soldier who is captured along the border after a night out with
180
I. HICKEY
friends with his life being held as a ransom against that of the boy in Belfast jail. Both
young men will ultimately die by the end of the play and this furthers the sense of loss,
and of wasted youth, at the hands of violence. While the IRA grieve for, and mythologise,
the boy in Belfast jail as a martyr for Ireland, Leslie’s side is less enthusiastic and caring
about his capture:
You’re as barmy as him if you think what’s happening to me is upsetting the British
Government. I suppose you think they’re all sitting around in the West End clubs with
handkerchiefs over their eyes, dropping tears into their double whiskies.47
Despite this being a rather poignant moment within the text, there is a deeper level of
meaning and critique at work within this scene. “The Hostage” enables Behan to attract a
British audience and to critique post-war British society, but also to subtly unite and hybridise
working class Dublin with its English counterpart. In a practical sense, both societies reflect
each other through the haunting nature of British colonial exploits in Ireland. Irish identity is
haunted by English language and culture – but Irish identity is still unique to its place and
space. Within the play, Leslie is simply doing a duty that is demanded by his nation and out of
a necessity to earn a wage. Leslie is a victim of a fanatical IRA entrenched in past ideologies
and his own upper-class government who see working class men as mere pawns in a game
of war. Both the working-class IRA men and women, and the English Leslie, are victims of
nationalism which deems the sacrifice of young men’s lives as worthy signifiers of loyalty and
justification of warfare. There is a deep postcolonial element at work here within the play.
Both sides suffer as a result of past, colonial ideologies with Bhabha commenting that “the
language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the
rhetorical figures of a national past”.48 The IRA men and women’s notions spring from, and
are driven against, the haunting presence of colonial injustices against the Irish nation with
Leslie, although wholly innocent from these actions, being ensnared in the old colonial mind
set of adventure through joining the army. Derrida comments that “those who inspire fear
frighten themselves, they conjure the very spectre they represent”.49 Despite this critique,
we can easily sympathise with Leslie’s position in the play. He does not understand the
historical position of Britain in Ireland, nor care about it, and becomes a victim of the spectres
of Irish nationalism embodied in the IRA supporters in the play:
Soldier: What have I ever done to you that you should shoot me?
Pat: I’ll tell you what you’ve done, Some time ago there was a famine in this country and
people were dying all over the place. Well, your Queen Victoria, or whatever her bloody
name was, sent five pounds to the famine fund and at the same time she sent five pounds
to the Battersea Dog’s Home so no one could accuse her of having rebel sympathies.50
Again, the inhabitants of the house revert back to the past in an attempt to justify their
villainous actions of the present. However, yet again, the myths that they create around
the past and historical narratives are false. James H. Murphy comments on Queen
Victoria’s donation to Irish famine relief noting that:
The Irish nationalist myth about Queen Victoria and the famine has been, and still is, that she
was utterly indifferent to it. Proof of this was the claim that she had merely donated £5
toward famine relief. In The Great Hunger Cecil Woodham Smith tried to alter this view by
revealing that the queen had given £2,000 to the Rothshild appeal.51
IRISH STUDIES REVIEW
181
While those in the house may not be intentionally falsifying history, they too become
victims of these incorrect nationalist myths with Derrida noting in Specters of Marx that
“like those of the blood, nationalisms of native soil not only sow hatred, not only commit
crimes, they have no future, they promise nothing even if, like stupidity or the unconscious, they hold fast to life”.52 The focus within this scene is on the collective instead of
the individual which enables those in the brothel to easily assuage any feelings of guilt felt
through their actions. In a certain sense, they are oblivious to their wrongdoings and their
cruelty towards Leslie which again see’s Behan flip the prominent rhetoric which these
individuals propagate regarding British cruelty that has been committed upon them, and
the nation, in order to portray the inhabitants of the house as being similarly villainous.
While Leslie is the encapsulation of Otherness within the text, he is also the bearer of
truth and the embodiment of a new Ireland, one that is attempting to illustrate a freer and
more hybrid form of identity post the fundamentalism of De Velera. After finding out that
he is to be shot, he notes, “perhaps I’ll meet this geezer on the other side. We can have a
good laugh about it”.53 Leslie bears no animosity towards the boy in Belfast and this
moment of acceptance of the Other, despite competing notions of identities is what
Behan probes, and is hopeful of, within a new, modern version of Ireland. Those that hold
Leslie hostage in the brothel are interested in him for his Otherness but never free him or
fully engage with him because they are bound by their connections to the past.
Wickstrom notes that those in the house would “save Leslie if they could, but their lives
are so distorted and warped by clinging to the phantoms of the past, their society so
cruelly hung-up, that any effort to save him is grotesque and abortive, or else there is no
effort at all”.54 In this sense those who inhabit the house are villainous because they are
accomplices to the killing of this young man, the same age as the boy in Belfast, and
therefore are just as villainous as the British forces who they place these badges upon. At
the beginning of the play difference, Otherness and those who embody it are referred to
as “dirty foreign bastards”,55 whereas by Act Three Meg asks a vital question: “When the
boy’s dead, what good would it be to croak this one? It wouldn’t bring the other back to
life now, would it?”.56 This serious moment where Leslie’s life hangs in the balance is not
met with contemplation or consideration, but instead with a moment of critique and
comedy. Leslie laments the moment he was captured with Pat taking on the role of the
critic:
Soldier: I was just walking out of a dance hall, when this geezer nabs me. “What do you
want?” I says. “Information,” he says. “I ain’t got no information,” I says, “apart from me
name and the address of the girls in the N.A.A.F.I.” “Right,” he says, “we’re taking you to
Dublin. Our Intelligence want to speak to you”.
Pat: Intelligence! Holy Jesus, wait till you meet ‘em. This fellow here’s an Einstein compared to them.57
This serious episode tinged with comedic purpose sees Pat critique the ability of the IRA,
but there are deeper probings within this. Throughout the play Behan offers many
opportunities where the inhabitants of the house could save or release Leslie, but they
always ignore this call or find a comedic comment to deflect from the gravity of the
situation. The never-ending cycle of violence and a possible relinquishing of the past is
hereby presented to them but they fail to grab hold of it. Instead the past binds them to
182
I. HICKEY
continue on the villainous route they undertake with Derrida remarking that “everything
begins before it begins”.58 Leslie is also a victim of this past and has been dragged into it
on account of his identity and British acts of colonialism that engulfed Ireland historically.
This is illustrated in a discussion that takes place between Leslie and Teresa regarding
Monsewer:
Teresa: Anyway, he left your lot and came over here and fought for Ireland.
Soldier: Why, was somebody doing something to Ireland?
Teresa: Wasn’t England, for hundreds of years?
Soldier: That was donkey’s years ago. Everybody was doing something to someone in
those days.
Teresa: And what about today? What about the boy in Belfast Jail? Do you know that in
the six counties police walk the beats in tanks and armoured cars.
Soldier: If he was an Englishman they’d hang him just the same.59
While those within the house exist is a state of historical stasis the relationship that
unfolds between Leslie and Teresa can be looked upon as that of the new future of
inclusion and acceptance of the Other in Ireland. It is an element of hope that exists within
the play as they exchange pictures of each other and have a sexual encounter. Their plan
to meet each other in Armagh after his possible release multiplies this notion of acceptance and compounds the idea that refusing to blindly adhere to the influence of the past
can lead to, and create, a future of peace and hybridity:
Soldier: I’m due a week-end’s leave an’ all . . .
Teresa: I could pay my own way, too.
Soldier: No, you needn’t do that. I’ve got enough for both of us.60
It is the “us” of Leslie’s words to Teresa that unites both together as a possible romantic
couple after their time in the house, but on a deeper level of uniting both sides of the
political divide. Behan here assuages more extreme nationalist sentiments in favour of a
hybrid society that embodies acceptance of all people. It is a new Ireland that can be
created through this relationship, but, like all other interactions and events within the play
the glimmer of hope the shines through the cracks of ideology is covered by the blanket
conformity to the past by those in the house. Immediately after making these plans with
Leslie the I.R.A officer appears in the scene. Teresa’s line to Pat and the officer immediately
after this encounter of, “It’s not the truth your telling me”,61 can be read in terms of the
actual scene itself regarding the time of night or it can be interpreted as Teresa finally
announcing that she is no longer bound to the past of violence and martyrdom but
instead is a representative of a new Ireland free from the shackles of blind hatred against
individuals.
The finale of the play ties all these notions together as the inhabitants of the house,
such as Mulready and Rio Rita, have informed the police about the hostage situation and a
raid ensues. The raid can be looked upon as contemporary society attacking those who
ideologically dwell in the past. All the characters adopt their true roles in this instance;
IRISH STUDIES REVIEW
183
Monsewer and Pat revert to fighting against the raiders to the battle cry of “Up the
Republic”62 and the IRA officer who forced misery upon Leslie in the name of Irish
freedom flees and deserts the fight. During the raid Leslie is killed by gunfire but the
fact of whether it was at the hands of the IRA or the police remains unknown and adds to
the sense that either side can inflict death. Those who supported the IRA in their
imprisonment of Leslie remain villainous in the end but are victims in the sense that
they are driven to this through a sense of extreme Nationalism and Patriotism that springs
forth from the past to haunt the present. The final exchange between Pat and Teresa
captures this:
Pat: Don’t cry. Teresa. It’s no one’s fault. Nobody meant to kill him.
Teresa: But he’s dead.
Pat. So is the boy in Belfast jail.
Teresa: It wasn’t the Belfast Jail or the Six Counties that was troubling you, but your lost
youth and your crippled leg. He died in a strange land, and at home he had no one. I’ll
never forget you, Leslie, till the end of time.63
The ending suggests that despite the events that have unfolded the mentalities of those
in the house have not changed. They are doomed to be haunted by the spectres of the
past and extreme nationalist ideologies that make them not singularly villains or victims,
but villainous victims with Derrida stating that:
No one talks of anything else. But what else can you do since it is not there, this ghost, like any
ghost worthy of the name? And even when it is there, that is, when it is there without being
there, you feel that the spectre is looking, although through a helmet; it is watching,
observing, staring at the spectators and the blind seers, but you do not see it seeing, it
remains invulnerable beneath its visored armor.64
Pat is still haunted by the very past that has maimed him and reduces him to criminality in
order to make a living while Monswer still believes that he is fighting during the 1916
Rising. They are victims of the past and extreme Nationalism just like Leslie. Those who
inhabit the house can also be regarded as villains because they refuse to break from this
past and overcome it. They are hostages to nationalism and the past and ultimately
contribute to the death of Leslie in the same brutal manner as the hanged IRA boy they
elegise and mythologise throughout the text.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Brannigan, Brendan Behan Cultural Nationalism, 123.
Derrida, Specters, 123.
Simpson, “The Last Laugh,” 114.
Ní Ríordáin, “Behan,” 125.
Derrida, Specters, 20.
Ibid., 68.
Derrida, Writing, 374.
Levitt, “Hostages to history,” 149.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 129.
Ibid., 131.
184
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
I. HICKEY
Ibid.
Poulain, Irish Drama, 139.
Derrida, Specters, 167–8.
Pearse, Collected Work of Padraic H. Pearse, 221.
Ibid., 136–7.
See note 2 above.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 132.
Kearney, Brendan Behan, 122.
Brannigan, Brendan Behan Cultural Nationalism, 108.
See note 2 above.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 167–8.
de Man, Rhetoric, 76.
Brannigan, Brendan Behan, 114.
Derrida, Specters, 7.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 194.
Ibid., 180.
Ibid., 179.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 134.
Ibid., 135–6.
Ibid., 210.
Ibid., 210.
Ibid., 210.
Poulain, Irish Drama, 143.
Gelb, “Brendan Behan’s Sober Side,” 160.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 143.
Ibid., 142.
See note 36 above.
Derrida, Specters, 125.
Behan and Lotringer, “The Thin Man,” 25.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 201.
Derrida, Specters, 169.
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 35.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 189.
Jeffs, Brendan Behan, 166.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 212.
Ibid., 217.
Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 294.
Derrida, Specters, 145.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 215.
Murphy, Abject Loyalty, 63.
Derrida, Specters, 213.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 229.
Wickstrom, “The Heroic Dimensions,” 135.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 133.
Ibid., 218.
Ibid., 218.
Derrida, Specters, 202.
Behan, “The Hostage,” 185–6.
Ibid., 230.
Ibid., 230.
Ibid., 233.
Ibid., 236.
Derrida, Specters, 124.
IRISH STUDIES REVIEW
185
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006.
Behan, Brendan. “The Hostage.” In Behan: The Complete Plays, edited by Alan Simpson, 127–238.
London: Methuen, 1992.
Behan, Brendan, and Sylvère Lotringer. “The Thin Man: An Interview with Brendan Behan.” Field Day
Review 1 (2005): 3–28.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In Nation
and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 291–322. London: Routledge, 2000.
Brannigan, John. Brendan Behan Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer. Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 2002.
de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 2001.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International.
Oxon: Routledge, 2006.
Gelb, Arthur. “Brendan Behan’s Sober Side.” In Brendan Behan: Interviews and Recollections Volume 2,
edited by E.H Mikhail, 159–161. London: The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1982.
Jeffs, Rae. Brendan Behan, Man and Showman. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company,
1968.
Kearney, Colbert. The Writings of Brendan Behan. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977.
Levitt, Paul. M. “Hostages to History: Title as Dramatic Metaphor in the Hostage.” In The Art of
Brendan Behan, edited by E.H Mikhail, 146–155. London: Vision Press, 1979.
Murphy, James H. Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland during the Reign of Queen
Victoria. Washington D.C: The Catholic University Press, 2001.
Ní Ríordáin, Clíona. “Brendan Behan’s the Hostage: Translation, Adaption or Recreation of an Giall?”
In Reading Brendan Behan, edited by John McCourt, 117–126. Cork: Cork University Press, 2019.
Pearse, Padraic. Collected Work of Padraic H. Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches. Dublin: Maunsel
& Roberts, 1922.
Poulain, Alexandra. Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.
Simpson, Alan. “Behan: The Last Laugh.” In Brendan Behan: Interviews and Recollections Volume 1,
edited by E.H Mikhail, 111–118. London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1982.
Wickstrom, Gordon M. “The Heroic Dimensions of Brendan Behan’s the Hostage.” In The Art of
Brendan Behan, edited by E.H Mikhail, 130–138. London: Vision Press, 1979.