Word: behan
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...Brendan Behan, the often-drunk Irish playwright, thinks most people are fools. In The Hostage, he tries to prove his point by mocking both the characters and the audience...
...combine to kill an innocent young man, but it never lets the audience stop laughing. Even when the dead man rises, still wrapped in his shroud, to tell the audience it is going to hell, the viewers laugh and applaud--the threat comes in the form of a jingle. Behan fails to make his audience seem stupid; he merely demonstrates that a clever playwright can confuse his house...
...Behan sneers at all his characters. His IRA soldiers fight fiercely for an utterly ridiculous cause. The social workers sing a parody on "Danny Boy" entitled "No One Loves You But Yourself." When the soldier demands to know why he is to die, the caretaker can only cite English atrocities to Ireland during the reign of Queen Victoria...
That's the trouble. By loading his play with comic lines and humorous situations, Behan makes his audience laugh confusedly through a tragedy. That they laugh may prove to Behan that they are fools, but to me it proves only that a skilled dramatist can confuse his audience...
...Brendan Behan on Joyce (Folkways; $5.95) is a hilariously informal lecture delivered by the barroom-and-music-hall playwright to the learned exegetes of the James Joyce Society. This is pub criticism, garrulous and guileful, with now and again a boozy glint of insight...