Hugh Leonard Summary

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... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Hogan 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 an... Read more

Critical Essay by Frank Rich 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 pe... Read more

Critical Essay by Victor Power Da is Hugh Leonard's best play. For the first time, Ireland's most prolific and commercially successful workhorse of the theatre has proved that he can in... Read more

Critical Essay by Eric Shorter [In Summer,] several more or less unsettled Irish couples turned up on a Dublin hillside, to ruminate, reminisce, dream and vaguely consider the way things were going o... Read more

Critical Essay by John Russell Taylor Leonard is by no means a bad writer, but he seems very uncomfortably cast in his current role of Ireland's greatest living playwright. He persistently, an... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Eder Hugh Leonard's recollections of his Dublin childhood [in "Home Before Night"] are a charming and gritty advertisement for the past, without being q... Read more