Hugh Leonard was born in Dublin. As he records in his autobiographical volume, Home Before Night (1979), his name was originally John Byrne, but he was adopted soon after his birth and later on called himself John Keyes Byrne, using the name of his...

Character actor Barnard Hughes re-creates his award-winning Broadway performance as the dead fogy "Da," an adoptive father haunting his playwright son in this stagey Irish play adaptation. Bullheaded and full of blarney, he's the Walter Brennan of faith and begorra land-one of the movie's...

Byline: LIAM COLLINS THE official speeches were made and proceedings about to be wound up when Hugh Leonard piped up from his chair, "I had a speech ready, but I don't have to make it . . ." But of course...

The manner in which layers and layers of motivation are peeled away [in A Walk on the Water] is deft, and so is the technique of sliding from a dialogue between Owen and Alma in 1956 to a dramatization of Owen's memory of 1945. Each of the seven roles gives an actor more than a stereotype to grapple with, but there is about the play the air of a technical exercise. Stephen D, however, is one of the most impressive plays to appear in Dublin since the war….

If Hugh Leonard had a taste for grandiose subtitles, there are several that might have graced the cover of [Home Before Night]: 'The Making of a Playwright', or 'The Birth of the New Ireland' to name but two of the themes that curl around this memoir of the years before he found his vocation. But if Leonard does have a message for the reader it is that one good story is worth a bargain basement of themes; and Home Before Night leaves you to sort them out for yourself…. Hom...

The very best moments in Hugh Leonard's play "Summer" are the very first. The lights come up on a grassy hill high above Dublin, and we find eight people relaxing after a picnic lunch, reclining in the sod, saying nothing. It's obvious that these people all belong to the same party, but, for this extended instant, each character is isolated, staring off into a lonely space of his own choosing. Yellow light hangs heavy in the air. Birds chirp in the distance. One of the figures sl...