THE rituals of hostage-taking have changed since Frank McGuinness wrote this fine play 13 years ago. As poor Ken Bigley and others discovered recently, a captive in Iraq can expect his fate to be speedily decided. But John McCarthy, Brian Keenan and the other Beirut hostages the dramatist had in mind in 1992 found themselves in a concrete-bunker version of Waiting for Godot. McGuinness’s three characters don’t know why they are trapped, who has power over them, whether they’ll ever be saved, and how they are to get through month after month after month.

This also creates obvious problems for the author. But McGuinness passes the Godot test, keeping us absorbed even when, as Beckett’s characters said, “nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful”. That’s due not only to his painful, funny, always unsentimental dialogue but, on this occasion, to the quality of Dominic Dromgoole’s cast. With Jonny Lee Miller as an introverted American doctor, Aidan Gillen as a garrulous Irish journalist and David Threlfall as a widowed teacher of English from Peterborough, you don’t notice the lack of conventional tension.

Partly that’s because we do get that other great dramatic ingredient, conflict. These men inevitably get on each other’s nerves. And when Threlfall’s Michael belatedly joins the other two, we’re reminded that the Middle East isn’t the only place where there are political and religious divides. “Give us a dose of the stiff upper lip,” jeers Gillen’s Edward in a fake-blimpish accent — and ancestral resentments threaten to re-create Falls Road hostilities in Beirut.

But in McGuinness’s view these are superficial. He signals this, as entertainingly as only an Irish dramatist could, by letting Michael say there would have been no potato famine if the peasants had “tried for a more balanced diet”, and he shows it by charting the growing intimacy and, yes, depth of the men’s bond. When Miller’s Adam disappears, missing presumed dead, and Gillen’s Edward succumbs to despair, it’s fussy, old-maidish Michael who finds and communicates the strength and defiance.

That’s quite a test for Threlfall, who begins as a bit of a caricature and ends as a bit of a hero, but he passes it triumphantly. So do Miller and Gillen when they must show the yearning, the anguish, the scorching memories and terrible regrets behind, respectively, the quiet American self-sufficiency and the Irish bravado.

And so does McGuinness when he changes tone to show the men’s survival techniques: pretend letters home, remembered songs and poems, imaginary horse races, tennis matches and rides on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Their grubby bodies may clank around. Their minds stay unchained.

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