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...

Hugh Leonard's recollections of his Dublin childhood [in "Home Before Night"] are a charming and gritty advertisement for the past, without being quite the real thing…. Mr. Leonard is a playwright, and an appealing one. In the kind of fairly traditional theater he practices, the writer speaks indirectly, through his characters. The "I" in "Home Before Night" is, in theory, the author, but we do not feel that he is speaking directly to us. He could be a...

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 think of a dozen things about it that touched me in one way or another. But they seem somehow threadbare in the retelling…. Mr. Leonard has a typically Irish gift for metaphor, as well as the familiar Irish abundance of charming and eccentric relatives…. [Surely] the love between Jack and his ma and da is irresistible—the love that w...

[Summer] is less tightly focused, less dramaturgically clever, less sentimentally charming than Leonard's other play, Da…. But Summer has gentle virtues of its own. A group of middle-aged people sit on the grass, thinking long, wistful thoughts about their lives, and a couple of young ones voice their hopes for the future: Summer has this in common with the second act of The Cherry Orchard. But in Leonard's Ireland there is no sound of a far-off breaking string to indicate the end of an...

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 infuse some heart as well as technical virtuosity into his work. It is unashamedly autobiographical; in a program note Leonard states that his father was a "man in whose life there was not one ounce of conventional—i.e. theatrical—drama." (pp. 397-98) The father-son relationship, the "topping" of the fa...

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 one would say deliberately, resists the temptation to write great plays. Instead, he is essentially a miniaturist, interested in the little, ordinary lives of little, ordinary people. And sometimes they are just that little bit too little, too ordinary, to sustain interest in the theatre…. A Life potters through an evening with Drumm, the t...

It's instructive as well as entertaining to compare the two autobiographies composed by [Hugh Leonard]; one is the play "Da" …, and the other is ["Home Before Night", an] eloquent little book of merry and bitter reminiscence. Contrary to what one might expect, the play is leisurely and the book pell-mell. In the theatre, we are allowed to take our time in getting to know the easygoing gardener-father, the disappointed mother, the tight-lipped employer; between cover...

[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 the play are also presented in Home Before Night. It doesn't matter; they are adaptable to either literary form. But in the play they are bathed in the softening light of affectionate reminiscence. In the memoirs they are stark, etched in acid. The playgoer who was charmed by "Da" should be warned that reading Home Before Nig...

[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-nol Lane. The achievement, however, is individual. The form, while not new, encompasses exactly the demands of Mr Leonard's story. Because Charlie's memories of his father, his Da, become concrete when he returns to Dublin for his funeral, it seems only right that the material figure of his father should dominate most of the per...

[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 over a period of years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some were afraid of death. Others were afraid of life. A few were afraid of love. And the generally rueful sub-Chekhovian mood was not without its charms, humour and honesty of observation. But nothing ever came to a dramatic head; which may have been the author's point. If so, t...