An Giall [is] the restrained and almost forgotten tragi-comedy in Irish by Behan on which The Hostage is based….

An Giall (The Hostage) had its première in … Dublin. At the end of a successful run, [Joan] Littlewood offered to stage the play in London if Behan would translate it into English. Behan accepted the offer and The Hostage was presented to the English-speaking world…. However, a comparison of the Irish and English texts reveals that The Hostage is not a translation; it is a drastically modified version of the original play.

The fact that The Hostage is more than a translation begins to emerge as soon as one examines the characters in the two versions of the play. There are ten characters in An Giall; there are fifteen in The Hostage. (p. 165)

The added characters contribute nothing to the plot of The Hostage, but they contribute a great deal to its tone, which is very different from that of the original…. The tone of the opening of An Giall is solemn; the tone of the opening of The Hostage is that of a stage-Irish interlude [with the added characters dancing "a wild Irish jig"], and such interludes interrupt the play with monotonous regularity.

The added characters also serve to make The Hostage a much more bawdy play than the original and allow the introduction of a host of topical English issues of the day…. An Giall concentrates exclusively on Irish issues, such as Partition, the I.R.A. and its endless splits …, and De Valera's remoteness from the people. These may be found in The Hostage, but they are almost buried under the avalanche of issues added for the amusement of an English audience.

There are no wild Irish jigs in An Giall. The only Irish dancing in the play is done by Teresa and Kate, who dance to a hornpipe which they hear on the radio at the end of the first act. As they dance to the beautiful and haunting Irish melody, "The Blackbird," they are interrupted by the appearance of Leslie. The melody is an oblique comment on Leslie: the Irish word for blackbird, londubh, is also a metaphor for hero. In The Hostage Teresa and Meg dance to a reel played by Kate on the piano. Gradually they are joined by everyone in the house in a swirling, interweaving dance, which is interrupted by the appearance of Leslie. In both versions of the play dancers and hostage are abruptly juxtaposed, but the juxtaposition is more subtle and complex in the original.

Unlike The Hostage, there are very few songs in An Giall. (pp. 166-67)

Such anti-English rebel songs [as] the bitter "Who fears to speak of Easter Week" in act two [of The Hostage] … are a prominent feature of the play, but there are none in the original.

Pat's action of seizing a bottle of stout before bursting into song exemplifies one of the notable differences between the two versions. The Hostage has the dubious distinction of being one of the most drink-sodden plays in Anglo-Irish literature. As the directions for act one indicate, one of the main activities of the inhabitants of The Hole is the pursuit of stout. The ubiquitous drink in An Giall, tea, would probably appear most un-Irish to a non-Irish audience. There is only one reference to alcoholic drink in the play. (p. 167)

It is very evident that a determined effort was made to make The Hostage more amusing and comprehensible to an English audience than the original…. There are many jokes in The Hostage which are not in the original. Some of them are very old and rather mechanically inserted…. (pp. 167-68)

Much of the wit of An Giall is not present in The Hostage, simply because it is not translatable…. There is a fine irony in Behan's use of the subtleties of Irish [in An Giall] to mock the Irish language revival organization under whose auspices his play was written and published. (p. 168)

The most striking feature of An Giall is the contrast between the innocent romance of Teresa and Leslie and the brutal world in which it takes place. The setting may be a bawdy house, but their behaviour is remarkably chaste…. There is far less emphasis on the romance in The Hostage and its tone is altered…. In The Hostage they are older, tougher and obviously more experienced sexually…. (pp. 170-71)

The reasons for the differences between the two versions of the play are fairly obvious. A serious play about the age-old "Irish Question" stood little chance of notice in England in the late fifties, particularly in view of the fact that it contains no drinking except tea, no wild Irish jigs, no anti-English rebel songs and no mob scenes. By the random addition of such ingredients, The Hostage panders to popular conceptions of the Irish. An Giall contains many allusions to Irish figures, organizations and places which would probably be lost on English audiences. This problem is handled in The Hostage by substituting English allusions for many of the Irish ones, but the effects are frequently incongruous. The appeal of The Hostage is widened by making it bawdy and peppering it with allusions to most of the popular issues of the day, ranging from the Wolfenden Report to nuclear disarmament, none of which appear in the original.

The principal effects of the changes are the destruction of the integrity of the original play, a drastic alteration of its tone, and a reduction of the impact of its most striking feature: the tender romance between Teresa, the Irish orphan girl, and Leslie, the English orphan boy, in a brutal world that will not permit their simple, unconscious and human solution to the eight centuries of hatred and bloodshed which have divided their people. (p. 171)