Brendan Behan first wrote the play The Hostage in the Irish language, as An Giall. This version is much less comical than the English version, which is, according to Declan Kiberd's notes, a music-hall adaptation: Kiberd calls An Giall "an austere and moving tragedy", and as such, something quite distinct from The Hostage. The play has been published in Irish by the Gallery Press as "Poems and a Play in Irish", together with his poems and songs in the language. Behan's Irish is, despite some minor quirks, not bad at all for a non-native speaker of the language: for instance, he is quite able to pun in Irish.