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 town crosspatch … while, brought up short by a brush with the idea of imminent death, he looks on his life and asks himself and us what it has all amounted to. The answer, unfortunately, is not very much: not enough, anyway, to keep the attention from constantly wandering while we hear about his unsuccessful courtship of the local good-time-girl … and his traumatic participation in a local debate, more...