Theatre: Hostage

Dog Day Afternoon? Atti-pah. Munich? Quit your kvetching. The botched hostage scenario has been funny before, but surely never this funny. It’s called Hostage, and like the Bruce Willis film of the same name, it’s about hostages. Unlike the Bruce Willis film, this was written by Keith Akushie (known to everyone outside the ADC Illuminati as "you know, the one who sounds a bit like Moss off of The IT Crowd"). It won the Harry Potter Prize for Most Magical New Comedy, and was received in glowing terms by judge Jesse Armstrong, who basically implied it was so strong it’d wrestle you to the floor and punch you in the head with laughing.

He is sort of right. It is funny – and ‘strong’, which I took to mean that it had the lean and hungry look of a proper piece of grown-up writing. I can therefore see it appealing to more than just drunk students. The problem is, at 11pm in the last few days of term, you probably will be a drunken student – will you find it the comic beasting Armstrong claims it is?

The lights come up on three people tied to a chair, and one person sitting in the corner with a pair of tights on his head (he’s the hostage – just kidding). The police are outside and getting shifty on the old trigger finger. Hilarity ensues.

Most of all, this is through the interplay between Ellie Ross, Patrick Walshe McBride, and Mark Fiddaman as the unfortunate captives. Akushie engineers their release from the chairs early in the play, allowing them to roam around the office set, fetching food and home-brewed beer from increasingly random/sublime locations.

Against a background of bitching over pasta salads and leftover wraps, each character is brought into definition. One of them’s a klepto, one of them may have had ‘a thing’ with their captor, one of them has an undue love for Mervyn King (“he’s a shit banker!”, he is memorably rebuked, and who really knows enough about the world to disagree?). All three were pretty brilliant at managing the balance between boring office drone, intriguing dramatic character, and funny comedy person.

I liked Joe “Lylat Wars” Bannister as Simon the Kidnapper, too. Wasn't he a bit too nice, though? I don’t want Pacino, but it becomes apparent he’s pretty toothless. It didn’t bother me unduly (But... but... THEY CAN ESCAPE NOW!), but with a bit more menace Akushie could have extracted a lot more comedy.

My one reservation is that, like Simon the Nice Kidnapper, at times it just felt a bit safe. Granted, it takes extraordinary skill to write a plot that unravels so naturally, and makes such use of a simple set, and allows the actors to embody four very different characters. Akushie has done an amazing job. But the office politics weren’t covered in a particularly novel way, and there wasn’t enough bite to the writing to make you think it represented an exciting new voice instead of something more conventional. It’s dependably excellent, consistently funny – and it’s a mark of how high Akushie should aim that those can be read as criticisms.

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