In 1957, his Irish-language play "An Giall" ("The Hostage") opened in the Damer Theatre, Dublin. Reminiscent of Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation", it portrays the detention in a teeming Dublin house in the late 1950s of a British conscript soldier, seized by the IRA as a hostage pending the scheduled execution in Northern Ireland of an imprisoned IRA volunteer. The hostage falls in love with an Irish convent girl, Teresa, working as a maid in the house. Their innocent world of love is incongruous among their surroundings since the house also serves as a brothel. In the end, the hostage dies accidentally during a bungled police raid, revealing the human cost of war, a universal suffering. The subsequent English-language version "The Hostage" (1958), reflecting Behan's own translation from the Irish but also much influenced by Joan Littlewood during a troubled collaboration with Behan, is a bawdy, slapstick play that adds a number of flamboyantly gay characters and bears only a limited resemblance to the original version.