It may seem, at first, that Rio Rita, Princess Grace, and the unfortunate Mulleady don't really belong in Behan'sHostage. Like many other "closet dramas" of its age, The Hostage, through its very use of homosexual characters, serves to reinforce many common tacit assumptions about homosexuality, as well as to foreground the nature of its practitioners.
If anything, the chaotic close more clearly delineates ,Grace's and Rita's proclivities as well as lengthening the "mileage" the author got from this theme. Brendan Behan obviously needed the secret policemen to enter the fray and cause the senseless death of the sacrificial Leslie, but why did he specifically use Rio Rita, Princess Grace, and Mulleady as an ironic deus ex machina? As Bert Cardullo notes,many critics see this constructed ending as "cheap" - "cheap in the sense that it suddenly negates the homosexual relationship between Grace and Rita, out of which the playwright has got much theatrical mileage, and cheap in the literal sense that it removes the need to hire extra actors to portray the police.'" While the economics of this recycling cannot be denied, it would do a disservice to the text to claim that the constructed ending "negates" Grace's and Rita's relationship. The Sense of an Ending: The Representation of Homosexuality in Brendan Behan's The Hostage ANN MARIE ADAMS Critics have long pondered the effectiveness of The Hostage's denouement. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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