The Masks of Hugh Leonard: Da as an Irish Comedy

Christopher Murray

It might be thought superfluous to address anything written by Hugh Leonard, pseudonym for John Keyes Byrne (1926-2009), as Irish. But the initial point to be made in creating the framework for this essay is that he himself fought against the categorization as too narrow. He had a problem with the nationalistic character of Irish drama as supervised by the notorious manager of the Abbey who succeeded Yeats and remained in control until after the new Abbey opened in 1966. This was Earnán de Blaghd, a former fighter for Irish independence, subsequently Minister of Finance in the new Free State, and after he became manager of the Abbey a man who insisted on the primacy of the Irish language in all its administration. Leonard’s negative view of the tradition of the Irish drama as founded by Yeats and his friends, had de Blaghd known it in 1956 when Leonard’s first play was staged by the Abbey, would have caused such uproar that he would likely have been banned:

With the coming of the Irish Free State our drama became even more parochial. We had a peasant government and a reactionary clergy, both of which were intensely anglophobic. What passed for Irish culture was imposed on artists and audiences alike: not for its intrinsic values but as a deliberate negation of all things English. Our art, music and literature became not a part of world culture but, like a limb that has been hacked from the body, a separate, atrophying entity. […] For more than thirty years – from the 1920s until the mid-1950s – Irish theatre has concerned itself with Irishmen first and men later.³⁶⁶

Almost alone among the Irish writers of this time, Leonard looked to America and England for his standards and models. It should not be forgotten that he was a very good theatre critic for Plays and Players in the 1960s. His knowledge of and admiration for American film were lifelong, and, as occasional reviewer of biographies and of film history for The Irish Times, he displayed both attributes alongside his customary caustic wit. His late novel Fillums (2004), the spelling an old jibe against the pronunciation of continuity women on RTĒ as they introduced a classic film, gives some idea of his taste in this area.

Consequently Leonard was regarded as something of a maverick among his peers of the day. Further, his political views, anti-republican and anti-Fianna Fáil, voiced fearlessly in his ‘Leonard’s Log’ for the Sunday Independent all through the 1980s and 1990s marked him out in certain quarters. One sample from 1985: ‘Mr Haughey’s mistake [Charles J. Haughey was Taoiseach at the time] is that while our young people crave for bread, he offers them circuses in the sweet by and by – with Northern Protestants being fed to the lions.’³⁶⁷ When Leonard wrote the satiric comedy Kill for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1982 he made more than plain his alienation from contemporary Ireland. The play has been described as ‘blatantly a political allegory’ directed at ‘several of his regular journalistic targets, primarily at what he considers the hypocrisy of official attitudes towards Northern Ireland.’³⁶⁸

So, when it came to the Field Day Anthology some years later it can be seen that Leonard might have a problem over inclusion. The editor of the section on modern Irish drama was D.E.S. Maxwell, author of a book on that subject, who already had a negative view of Leonard’s achievements: ‘Journalist, scriptwriter, adapter, Leonard is an enormously prolific writer, unfailingly a witty entertainer. He consequently invites the suspicion that he constructs his plays – with great skill – around good lines.’³⁶⁹ As to his ‘perversely disparaging’ remarks about the Irish dramatic tradition, Leonard was ‘clearly wrong-headed.’³⁷⁰ Maxwell wanted to include only excerpts from Leonard’s work in the Anthology. When Leonard discovered that Friel and Murphy were to get a whole play each in it he demurred, and after some further, futile discussion withdrew his permission entirely. Without explaining Leonard’s omission from the selection of contemporary playwrights, Maxwell felt free to underline how wrong Leonard was in his view of the tradition by contrasting his work with that of M.J. Molloy, commonly regarded as a successor to Synge: ‘The country people of the West, those who filled the emigrant ships to England in the 1950s, retain an imaginative vitality that has disappeared from the suburban world of Leonard, where the present is in intermittent conference with a past that has been trivialized or erased.’³⁷¹ Leonard was not admissible as a major playwright.

It can be added here in passing that the launch of the Field Day Anthology was a major affair, and the man who launched the publication was Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey. Given this history, it is to rub Leonard’s work against the grain, perhaps, to argue that in Da – his best play – the comedy is Irish before it is international. But such is the intention here.

As the Irish actor-playwright Charles Macklin had ruefully to concede when his comedy The True-born Irishman (1762) flopped under a new title in London following its Dublin success, there is such a thing as ‘a geography in humour as well as in morals’.³⁷² Different century, same problem. Ethnicity rules where humour is concerned. Some jokes simply do not travel; stereotypes tend to get in the way. Situations found hilarious in one country remain puzzling to audiences in another. But if there is a geography at play there is also a history. British comedy from the Restoration period, when it reinvented itself through French influence, is based on the love chase, polished wit, and the class system. As comedy of manners it thrived with remarkable consistency from John Dryden to Noël Coward; in more recent times a lower-middle class style has grown through Alan Ayckbourn’s abandonment of wit in favour of stupidity and of the conventional love chase in favour of ‘sheer invention’.³⁷³

American comedy grew out of English comedy of manners and in due course evolved in rather different ways to become democratically based versions of the American Dream: the pursuit of happiness, featuring ordinary hard-working couples, struggling in the land of opportunity and succeeding. I should say Neil Simon represents the pinnacle of contemporary American writers of comedy, and The Odd Couple (1965), an early success, the quintessence of the well-made Broadway hit. It is important to note that the situation in that play is not ‘sheer invention’ but based on the break-up of the marriages of Simon’s brother Danny and Danny’s friend Roy Gerber, who to save money lived together, with Danny doing the cooking. ‘This union didn’t prosper any better than either of their first marriages’, Simon comments in his memoir.³⁷⁴ However, he himself did and that’s life. It’s also, in the hands of a master, comedy.

It can easily be said that Hugh Leonard is a lot closer to Simon as a playwright than he is to Ayckbourn. The proof is in the one-liners. Here are just a few from Da alone: ‘Blessed are the meek: they shall inherit the dirt’; of marriage: ‘the maximum of loneliness and the minimum of privacy’; ‘if you ran into him with a motor car he’d thank you for the lift’; ‘There are no shallows to which you won’t sink, are there?’; and (most significantly), ‘the dangerous ones are those who amuse us.’ Similar bon mots have crept into many recent books on humour and wit.³⁷⁵ They are no more proof of the vacuity D.E.S. Maxwell implied than the epigrams of Oscar Wilde of that author. And it may be no harm to note that the lead character in The Odd Couple is called Oscar, while the two girls are Cecily and Gwen. Boom-boom. This may show the affinity that exists between Irish and Jewish humour, which tends to bypass the English version.³⁷⁶

In spite of this kinship between ethnic senses of humour, the geography persists as a distinguishing mark. Leonard’s work is based on what he experienced growing up in Dalkey, Co. Dublin, in the 1930s and after. The details are in his memoir, Home Before Night (1979) – six years after the premiere of Da, which anticipates some of it. Like Flann O’Brien before him, Leonard worked for years in the Irish civil service before he made a name for himself, and was to adapt O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive for the stage in 1965; following his successful adaptation of Joyce’s Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist in 1962 under the title Stephen D, his psychic geography was well established. His material was Dublin city. What drew him to the theatre for the first time was a production of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, and it was the realism that astonished him: ‘The life that roared through the play itself [apart from the acting] had spilled over from the stage, sweeping him with it so that he knew he would never again be content just to sit and watch and applaud with the rest of them.’³⁷⁷

Soon Leonard was submitting plays to the Abbey himself, Madigan’s Lock (1957) the only one to be published. It is thoroughly Irish in setting, characterization and vocabulary, even though the redoubtable Earnán de Blaghd rejected it: ‘I don’t like plays with a ghost in ’em’, he said, ‘and there, I thought, go Hamlet and Macbeth’.³⁷⁸ Leonard took the play to the new Globe company then playing at the Gate. It was to be nineteen years before he had another play at the Abbey, this time the new Abbey under the direction of Joe Dowling, who was an enthusiast. As a fellow Dubliner he understood the Irishness and wit of Leonard’s plays and directed the sequel of Da, namely, A Life (1979), as well as revivals of Da and Stephen D at the national theatre. In later years, artistic director Patrick Mason directed other new work, such as Love in the Title (1999). Leonard’s credentials, then, seem impeccable.

Da marks a special turning point in Leonard’s career. This is the play that was to bring him a Tony award on Broadway for best play. This is the play that was to expose him publicly on the Dublin stage when it had its Irish premiere in 1973 at the Dublin Theatre Festival. But it is so artful that it manages to mask reality once again, or rather perhaps transform it in order to dramatize the doubleness (it cannot be called duplicity) in Leonard’s very being. He was illegitimate. His Da was not his father; Mother was not his natural mother. Therefore the story he had to tell, the comedy he had to contrive, was a form of confessional catharsis – for even comedy can create purgation.

This double identity, which is such a major element in Leonard’s creative life, was rooted in traditional Anglo-Irish comedy. While not arguing that Leonard was influenced by Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Sheridan’s The Rivals, Wilde’s The Importance of being Earnest, and Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, all plays recording the colonialist stratagem of two conflicting selves as a way of expressing the Irish need for a mask in English society, I would see a continuity here. To be sure, with the foundation of the Irish dramatic movement in 1897, the emphasis was on authenticity without duplicity. Yet if Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907) is looked at in this context, it is an examination of how becoming the mask (in the Yeatsian sense) is the colonialist’s route to freedom. I am inclined to see Synge’s Playboy as the paradigmatic comedy in the modern Irish theatre; I don’t see it divorced from what went before.

The relationship between the Irish drama staged at the Abbey theatre and the evolution of the liberation of the country is a complex one, but it is there and it is compelling. One of the things it brings out is how deep ‘performance’ has always been in the history of Irish colonialism. The Anglo-Irish tradition gave us the language and the technique, the idea of a theatre, through which we could transcend our disadvantages and achieve mastery over our lives. Because many of the playwrights around the turn of the twentieth century were, like Synge, renegades from Anglo-Irish stock, they provided a bridge between the old and the new styles and intentions. That is the nub of the development of a native Irish drama.

In postcolonial Ireland, where the country itself was divided in two, this sense of double identity intensified rather than dissolved. In drama, O’Casey was the first to represent this troublesome phenomenon as comedy verging on tragedy. In his Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Donal Davoren begins as a poet and ends a poltroon. Shunning the world in order to concentrate on his writing he accepts the role of hero when it is thrust upon him through the misunderstanding of those around him in the tenements. The double life Davoren leads is bogus on both sides. This is the revelation he is forced to recognize in the end. He is more shadow than substance of any denomination.

Everywhere one looks in O’Casey’s work there is this duality: the real Jack Boyle the waster in Juno and the Paycock (1924), as against the self-styled captain with a history of world travel, living in a dream world; Joxer Daly, Boyle’s other self, his feed, his parasite, sometimes his mask and at other times his leering anti-mask, serves well the world of Boyle’s illusions and dishonesty. Meanwhile, young Johnny Boyle, that frightened image of post-traumatic stress, pins his hope of survival on the flickering of a candle before a little shrine. In the greatest of O’Casey’s plays, disillusion plays its greatest role. One can see how it would fire a disadvantaged youth like Hugh Leonard circa 1955. ‘Is there anyone goin’, Mrs Clitheroe’, asks the consumptive child Mollser Gogan ‘with a titther o’ sense?’³⁷⁹

Hugh Leonard was born in the year The Plough and the Stars was first staged; its truths caused riots in the theatre. The pathology of the divided self was to endure into de Valera’s Ireland as Leonard’s inheritance. A post-O’Casey further example of this Irish characteristic is Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), where two actors are needed to play Private Gar and Public Gar. Leonard does something similar. In Da, Charlie the forty-two-year-old writer who returns from London to Dalkey for the funeral of his adoptive father is clearly a representation of Leonard himself. He had already written a television play by then on the theme of the encounter between the young self and his middle-aged counterpart. It would later be redrafted to fill a Theatre Festival bill as a one-act, under the title A View from the Obelisk (1983). The idea of time as allowing such coincidences fascinated Leonard as it fascinated the playwright he sometimes thought his natural father, Denis Johnston (1902-1984). Johnston saw time as capable of replaying itself. He developed the philosophy and physics of this idea in his strange book The Brazen Horn (1976), but it was in his plays that, rather in the style of Priestley’s I Have Been Here Before (1937) and An Inspector Calls (1946), Johnston revealed its possibilities. There was in 1957 a significant revival of Johnston’s first and most exciting play, The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ (1929), in which Micheál MacLiammóir reprised the role of Robert Emmet he had played when the play first opened at the Gate. This time it opened the first Dublin International Theatre Festival. It is very likely Leonard saw it. It is a play in which the actor playing the Irish hero, Emmet, is injured onstage and thereafter, while out cold, seems to wander around 1920s Dublin only to find it shrunk morally and politically from what it was in Emmet’s day of glory (in 1803). Then he wakes up to find only moments have passed in real time. Johnston has superimposed one time frame on top of another as a kind of theatrical palimpsest. Leonard does something similar in Da, though in a different style. The use of flashbacks, the defiance of the fourth wall by both Da (who is dead) and Young Charlie (who exists only in Charlie’s memory), the scenes shuffled in discontinuous yet continuing time are all modernist techniques of the early twentieth-century theatre, but made Irish by Denis Johnston in 1929. In taking them over here in Da, as well as in many other of his plays (Time Was, A Life, Love in the Title among others), Leonard was at the same time appropriating for his own use those much earlier dramatic ideas on duality, masking and identity found in Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, and so on, up to Brendan Behan – Irish writers who had to struggle with pleasing an English audience. Like Goldsmith and these others the writer Charlie qua Leonard can put the question in Da: ‘how could I belong there [in London] if I belonged here [in Dublin]?’³⁸⁰

In The Irish Comic Tradition Vivian Mercier discussed Irish humour, understood as fantasy, under the headings ‘macabre’ and ‘grotesque’. I have written elsewhere on ‘Irish Drama and the Fantastic’.³⁸¹ About Leonard’s use of fantasy there is no question whatsoever. From Madigan’s Lock on, he invariably had a paradise to search for. Lost Horizon (1937) was a favourite film, Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) a favourite novel. Leonard’s use of time, already noted, is also a means of basing many of his plays in fantasy. By the macabre Mercier means a peculiar sense of and attitude towards death. It is true we as a people are inordinately preoccupied with death. Didn’t Yeats say there were only two major themes, sex and death? At any rate, much Irish humour is about death; much of Irish drama is bound up with gallows humour.

Synge provides the best example. His poor health may have something to do with it, but all he wrote was either morbid or gloriously defiant of the inevitability of death. Riders to the Sea (1903) is one thing: we can accept a piling on of agony in a tragedy, even a dwarf one as Joyce regarded it. But in comedy? The Shadow in the Glen (1903) opens with an old dead man laid out by his young wife and a passing Tramp asking for shelter in the night. Then she goes outside and whistles piercingly for her lover. Later the dead man sneezes when the Tramp is alone with him and the play takes a fresh, comical turn. Dan Burke has merely pretended to be dead in order to catch his wife, Nora, with her lover and exact revenge. In the end the unexpected takes place, the wife stands up to her husband, the Tramp stands up for her, and in a burst of lyrical victory the pair of them leave for a life on the roads. The traditional death-and-resurrection theme makes Synge’s play comic, as in Boucicault’s The Shaughraun (1874) before that, and after that in the ballad, ‘Finnegan’s Wake,’ on which Joyce was to base his comic novel. The funny and the macabre sit easily together in Irish literature. Synge first heard the story for his little play on the Aran Islands, though he gave it a new, subversive, ending. His style helped to establish the modern Irish dramatic tradition.

The death-and-resurrection motif, then, as derived from folklore, was available to modern Irish writers of comedy. Synge would have known that as a scholar. Behan would have known it as a Gaeilgeoir and an Irish Catholic who described himself as ‘a daylight atheist’; when the dark came ‘he said his prayers.’³⁸² He dealt with this dread of death through comedy. The Quare Fellow (1954) is written like an Irish wake, with comic scenes all through, a traditional mark of respect for the man due to hang. The Hostage (1958), if one can set aside the fact that Behan’s text was altered by Joan Littlewood and her Workshop Theatre, ends with the resurrection of the eponymous hostage, the British soldier captured by the IRA and shot while trying to escape. It is an extraordinary moment when he rises again to sing his parody of Saint Paul:

The bells of hell

Go ting-a-ling-a-ling

For you but not for me.

Oh death where is thy

Sting-a-ling-a-ling

Or grave thy victory?³⁸³

A later, more thorough application of the theme in Thomas Kilroy’s, The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche (1968), gave it a new and profound twist. As Kilroy has said: ‘When I was writing it I did have a certain private academic fun in trying to write an ironic version of the old resurrection-fertility comedy.’³⁸⁴

This is where Hugh Leonard comes in. Da is a wake disguised as a comedy. The macabre note is muted, to be sure, and yet the scorn son piles on father and the constant jokes for which Da is responsible nevertheless lend what David Krause calls the ‘profanity’ necessary to comedy.³⁸⁵ It may be that Da’s line,’There’s some queer people walking the ways of the world’ (44) is a parody of Synge, raising the prospect of seeing Da as a version of Old Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World. Whatever about that, the Oedipal theme is present in the play in spades, even though Da is not Charlie’s natural father. Leonard’s variation is that Da is already dead at the opening of the play, which makes the parricide redundant and at the same time ironic. The gruffer and more insolent Charlie becomes in discouraging Da from displaying his lovable qualities, the more the audience feels drawn to Da in his warm-heartedness and incorrigibility. However often Charlie insists that Da is dead and exists only in his memory, no character could be less ghostlike; no Blithe Spirit he, for Da is there corporeally before our eyes. The role was recently played (at the Gate in 2012) with great effect by Owen Roe, Ireland’s answer to Simon Russell Beale, whose stage presence communicates vitality with every sound and movement. Roe played Da resurrected as the most alive figure on the stage.

Yeats drew a distinction between comedy and tragedy on the basis that character ‘is continuously present in comedy alone’, whereas it is passion that gives to the figures in tragedy their sense of life. To be alive, to be ‘real’ to us, Da has to be comic, like Falstaff, who, Yeats says, ‘has no passionate purpose to fulfil’.³⁸⁶ Yet Da has his great passionate explosion of jealousy in Act II when he forbids his wife ever again to venture where she might see ‘curse-o’-God-Ernie’, the man she loved and did not marry. The stage direction is explicit: ‘Even MOTHER, who knows him, is alarmed by the violence of his rage’ (64). Leonard presents the scene as a flashback, conjured by Charlie, who is helpless to intervene. He can only convey his horror: ‘(remembering) And the floorboards barked like dogs, and the cups went mad on their hooks’ (64). This magnificent scene, so well played by Roe and Ingrid Craigie in the Gate production, lifts Da well beyond the category of fool Charlie has foisted on him up to this point. Mother’s throwaway line after he has made his raging exit restores the play to comic mode: ‘The jealous old bags’ (65). Da exists to prove Yeats wrong.

Mercier is inclined to associate the macabre with the grotesque, citing the stone Sheela-na-gigs as evidence, with their blatant sexuality distorted by haggish facial features. Fear of sex within Irish culture can be associated with such distortion in female representation. Leonard exploits this feature also, but as a modernist transforms the grotesque into harmless mockery. A key scene in this regard occurs in Act I, in which Young Charlie lusts after the Yellow Peril. In a sense she is a Sheela-na-gig figure, except that she is young and beautiful, being a sex symbol, a goddess who could ‘both destroy and create’.³⁸⁷ Charlie describes her for Da in ‘real’ time just before the re-enactment of his encounter with her:

We all dreamed, privately and sweatily, about committing dark deeds with the Yellow Peril. Dark was the word, for if you were seen with her, nice girls would shun you and tell their mothers […] The Yellow Peril was the enemy of mothers. And the fellows [pals] would jeer at you for your beggarman’s lust – you with your fine words of settling for nothing less than Veronica Lake. […] The Yellow Peril never winked, smiled or flirted: the sure sign of an activist. (38)

As Young Charlie and Oliver stroll past her sitting on a bench and flicking through Modern Screen, the male gaze is openly enacted. ‘They say she’d let you. All you have to do is ask’, Oliver says. But she would ‘make a holy show of you’, perhaps, Young Charlie muses (39). The grotesquerie is all in the mind. When the young woman raises her head she has ‘a calm direct look, neither friendly nor hostile’, though Charlie is inflamed by ‘lust’ (38). Oliver, alarmed, beats a retreat. Urged on by his older self (the scene is, like many in the play, in double focus), Charlie sits beside her and, ‘What follows is ritual, laconic and fast’ (40). As he is making progress, pawing the girl’s knee and attempting to touch her breast from across the back of the bench, but actually ‘kneading and pinching her handbag, which is tucked under her arm’, the older Charlie remarks, ‘I think you’re getting her money all excited’ (42). ‘If you won’t stop’, she tells Young Charlie, ‘I’ll have to go down the back […] If you won’t stop.’ (42) He hoarsely accepts the invitation when suddenly there is a blast of an Irish song, as Da enters on his way home and in shock addresses his son. ‘Bruce’ from Trinity College, as he has just called himself, cringes while Da addresses Mary Tate (as she now identifies herself) cheerfully. ‘If my hand was free’, says older Charlie, ‘I’d have slashed my wrists’ (43). Da sits on the bench and settles in for a chat with Mary: ‘Your mother was one of the Hannigans of Sallynoggin. Did you know that?’ He pursues her genealogy until he can avow: ‘Don’t I know the whole seed and breed of yous!’ As Charlie notes, Da has turned the Yellow Peril into ‘a person’ before his very eyes: ‘Sure this is a grand girl’ (44). A potential sex scene is transformed into the unmasking of Charlie’s immaturity. After Da has gone off happily into the night, Mary repeats her invitation more personally to Young Charlie: ‘Well, will we go down the back? (44, emphasis added) but the unmasked youth makes his excuses and the scene ends. In a subversive way the scene can be read as Da making a man of Charlie.

Irish comedies do not usually end in a marriage. Synge’s Playboy is the standard here, because Pegeen Mike’s loss of Christy Mahon underlines the element of bittersweetness in the Irish representation. To be sure, Northrop Frye has outlined the myth of spring, whereby the victory of youth over age and new life over old is symbolized in the end by marriage as historically the pattern of romantic comedy. The final ‘festive ritual’ acts as symbol of ‘crystallization around the hero’ as a new society is germinated.³⁸⁸ Synge showed the opposite. He showed comedy enacting the break-up or denial of a marriage, overturning audience expectation in order to expose hypocrisy. By the time Hugh Leonard was writing, Synge’s model, in which ‘I’ve lost him surely’ is the endnote, had become too romantic (in Siobhán McKenna’s interpretation³⁸⁹) to satisfy. Leonard does include a marriage towards the end of Da but it is essentially a ritual of leaving. Young Charlie is being bustled out the door to catch his plane to Belgium to marry out of the tribe. Oliver goes with him as best man, but not his adoptive parents. The liminal moment is understated in order to keep the focus on them. There is to be no ‘crystallization’ around this hero, no new society in the formation. ‘You may as well be off, so. There’s nothing to keep you’, is about all Mother can say. So, even though Leonard avoids romance in his comedy, he nevertheless retains Synge’s paradigm in which the ending marks a leaving which is a critique of society. The older Charlie, reliving the painful parting, urges his younger self to go quickly: ‘Now. Goodbye, and out’ (75). After the wedding Charlie’s new life will grow in London, where he will pursue his career writing for television. He remains, while his young self departs. But what Young Charlie sees as ‘a beginning’ Mother sees as ‘the end’; he is outside the house, she inside; neither hears the other’s line but the audience hearing both sees the moment as powerfully ambivalent.

The final scene is in the present tense only. Drumm, who is in a sense Charlie’s alternative father, arrives before Charlie locks up and leaves forever. There is a kind of reckoning between them. Though Drumm believes Da was ‘an ignorant man’, at least he never knew disillusion (82). Drumm tells Charlie about the money, how Da had never used what Charlie sent over the years but set it aside as a lump sum to leave him. The shock leads to a recognition scene when Charlie confronts Da on the matter. What Charlie recognizes is that one cannot pay back love given freely; though he is more than ever in debt to Da there is no way to abolish it. He thinks that by tidying up the house and destroying almost all records he will be free. Even when he locks up and throws away the key to the little house he finds Da happily by his side, having ignored the stage’s fourth wall.

This Old Mahon and Christy leave for London together, even though one of them is dead. All tenses are now combined. Da was the patriarchal Ireland Leonard could no longer abide circa 1960; Da is the ghost who will be Charlie/Hugh Leonard’s muse; Da will prompt his writer-son to avenge himself as satirist and commentator on Haughey’s Ireland. The manager of the old Abbey told the young Leonard he didn’t like plays with ghosts in them. Twenty-five years later Leonard proved him wrong. By laying his private ghosts to rest he helped to liberate the ghosts of a nation, poverty, humiliation, fear of sex and death, and to renew Irish comedy in many of its ritualistic preoccupations.

Extract From: For the Sake of Sanity: Doing things with humour in Irish performance, edited by Eric Weitz (2014)

Cross Reference: Later Leonard Essay, Friel, Murphy, Kilroy

See Also: The Power of Laughter: Comedy and Contemporary Irish Theatre, edited by Eric Weitz