His early experience of prison and knowledge of the workings of the IRA (recounted in his autobiography Borstal Boy 1958) provided him with two recurrent themes in his plays. The Quare Fellow (1954) was followed by the tragicomedy The Hostage (1958), first written in Gaelic, which recounts the accidental ahooting of an English soldier taken hostage in a seedy brothel which is a center for the IRA.