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...
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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 and...
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Critical Essay by William J. Leonard
[Hugh Leonard] is author of the very successful Broadway play, "Da," and indeed all the characters, much of the action, and many of the best lines of...
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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 peo...
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Critical Essay by Julius Novick
[Summer] is less tightly focused, less dramaturgically clever, less sentimentally charming than Leonard's other play, Da…. But Summer has gentle virtues o...
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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 inf...
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Critical Essay by Ned Chaillet
[Da] is a memory play, honourably in the tradition of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, but more closely bound to the nostalgia of Peter Nichols's Forget-me-n...
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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 ov...
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Critical Essay by Irving Wardle
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...
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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, and...
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Critical Essay by Christopher Lehmann-haupt
Why did I find this memoir of an Irish boyhood so especially affecting? Replaying Hugh Leonard's "Home Before Night" in my mind, I can ...
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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 qu...
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Critical Essay by The New Yorker
It's instructive as well as entertaining to compare the two autobiographies composed by [Hugh Leonard]; one is the play "Da" …, and the oth...
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John Keyes Byrne
