THE HOSTAGE

Pearse Centre, Pearse St, Dublin Until Aug 16 8pm Sat/Sun Mat 2.30pm €19.95/

€14.95

Without any risk of overstatement, Wonderland Productions is a company that is really going places. A plucky, ideas-driven and indefatigable theatre group, they have had no easy access to conventional venues and have learned to improvise handsomely, staging their works in various site-specific venues. Alice Coughlan’s troupe have previously staged Molière’s The Miser in a Georgian home, her own version of Goldoni’s La Locandiera in a Tapas bar, and the original comedy Life Shop til You Drop! in venues from Dublin to Dubai.

A young company with a clearly classical sensibility, Wonderland’s new undertaking is Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. Its largest production yet, the show is performed in the birthplace of Padraic Pearse, a Victorian terrace house which here stands for the 1960s Dublin brothel-cum-safe house where the IRA hold Private Leslie Williams hostage for the night.

Behan’s play is populated with rebel heroes, homosexual navvies, whores, convent girls and decaying civil servants. As is so often the case with site-specific theatre – sometimes the associations between play and space chime, sometimes they clang. But Wonderland know their history. This venue ought to be an appropriately charged place for The Hostage’s execution.

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Michael Collins – The Musical Opera House, Cork