Leonard’s Progress: Hugh Leonard at the Dublin Theatre Festival

Emilie Pine

By any standards, Hugh Leonard has had an extraordinary dramatic career, penning twenty-five original full-length plays and nine adaptations or translations for the stage since 1954, in addition to credits as a screenwriter for television and film. At the Dublin Theatre Festival, Leonard has the distinction of having more plays produced than any other playwright, with eighteen original works and adaptations over the course of thirty-seven years. Indeed, if one looks at the record in this book of Irish plays premiering at the Festival, Leonard’s name is a constant presence in the years between 1960 and 1985. Leonard also contributed to the Festival by becoming Programme Director in 1979, the same year that Da premiered (and the Pope visited Ireland). His play Summer (1974) received a rehearsed reading at the 2007 Dublin Theatre Festival, where it was directed by Patrick Mason with a very strong cast of Irish actors, including Susan Fitzgerald and Mark Lambert. Yet at the fiftieth anniversary he seems to have been remembered mostly as an aged godfather of Irish theatre, rather than a grand master.

The relative disappearance of Leonard from the Irish stage was marked by ten years of waning reviews, ill health, and thus fewer plays. His last new play, Love in the Title, was produced in 1999; he no longer writes his satiric ‘log’ for the Sunday Independent; and, from an academic point of view, his work is rarely studied in Irish theatre or literature courses. This decline is seemingly confirmed by the reported rejection of his most recently written play by the Abbey Theatre.³⁹⁰ Whereas the plays of his contemporaries Brian Friel and Tom Murphy seem to accrue greater critical weight as they age, due in part to the popularity of staged revivals and in part because they are taught on school and university courses, Leonard’s work seems to be increasingly marginal. On the one hand, Leonard’s body of work has been consistently well received by audiences, and he has been described as a ‘major playwright of international importance’, yet on the other hand, despite these accolades, Leonard is seldom seen as central to contemporary Irish drama.³⁹¹ To explain this apparent paradox we must consider a range of factors, first among them that Leonard’s comic plays and his choice to represent the domestic lives of the urban middle class do not easily fit with an Irish critical preoccupation with the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland. Leonard’s plays simply do not correspond to the dominantly realist or naturalist context of plays that seek to represent the experiences of colonialism, emigration, and the national love of storytelling and masks. While Leonard’s characters may indulge in nostalgia for traditional Ireland, his plays seem to embody the fact that, in reality, that kind of Ireland is truly out of date. Instead of mapping Ireland’s colonial past, Leonard’s work for the theatre represents modern Ireland in transition, caught between ‘a new life and new values’ and the negotiations and betrayals that are made necessary by that collision.³⁹² Reviewing Leonard’s prose memoir Out After Dark John Banville writes that ‘The book is funny, packed with stories and embarrassing incidents… a splendid book, with an underlying seriousness the hasty reader may miss’.³⁹³ Banville’s statement could stand as a well-judged assessment of Leonard’s dramatic work. This essay will revisit that work in an attempt to be a less ‘hasty’ reader, to appreciate the humour that runs through all Leonard’s work, but also to take account of the underlying seriousness.

Jack Keyes Byrne took the pen name of Hugh Leonard, after a character from one of his plays, when he was first writing for the Abbey but still working as a civil servant. For Leonard, writing was an escape from the psychological monotony of work in the Land Commission; this is captured in his autobiography Home Before Night, in which he records his emotions after seeing Sean O’Casey’s Plough and the Stars:

The life that roared through the play itself had spilled over from the stage, sweeping him with it so that he would never again be content to just sit and watch and applaud like the rest of them. The thought burned him like a fever.³⁹⁴

Here there is the initial sense of defining himself in opposition to ‘the rest of them’, an apartness that would help drive him beyond passive consumption to active contribution. Most of all, there is the idea that the pulse of life is stronger on the stage than off it, that the energy of life is best experienced through the mediation of drama.

As well as offering an intellectual and emotional release, writing was also to become a financial and physical escape, once Leonard moved into screenwriting. In 1959, his work for television enabled him to leave the Civil Service and, eventually, to move to London and start making money as a professional writer. The actor David Kelly pays tribute to Leonard’s writing for the British television screen and stage as having kickstarted many Irish actors’ careers over the water, and making Irish characters if not quite respectable, then at least acceptable, to British audiences at a time when being Irish in England had a sense of stigma attached.³⁹⁵

In 1962, with the production of Stephen D. – a version of Joyce’s autobiographical works Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Leonard showed his talent for adaptation. Critically acclaimed, Leonard made Joyce not only accessible to theatre-goers but maintained the sense of experiment that defines Joyce’s work, specifying in the directions a stage with split levels, and maintaining an impressionistic style and fragmentary plot. What is apparent in Stephen D. is not only Leonard’s ability to deconstruct and adapt work for the stage, but also his capacity to do so with a level of innovation not otherwise on display in Irish theatre in the early 1960s: the play ‘marked a significant demarcation from what had gone before’. Perhaps what attracted Leonard to the Joyce project was the accord he felt with Joyce’s rejection of ‘the four great “F’s” of Ireland: faith, fatherland, family and friendship’.³⁹⁶ As for many writers, the work Leonard chooses for adaptation has certain affinities with his own, as the rejection of both patriotism and religion in Joyce’s work is something that strongly courses through Leonard’s also.

Leonard followed this success with two satiric plays that cut through the surface of the contemporary comedy of manners to comment on the shifting class structures of England and Ireland and, crucially, the moral vacuum at the heart of both. In The Au Pair Man (1968) Leonard turned his beam on the English class system where sexual favours can be exchanged for lessons in deportment, while in The Patrick Pearse Motel (1971) it is the turn of Irish sexual mores to be scrutinized. By this time, Leonard had moved back to Ireland, attracted by the tax-free status for artists, and he brought with him a love of farce, sharpened by recent productions of Feydeau on the London stage, in order to capture and caricature a type newly emerging in Ireland: the rich middle class. This new bourgeoisie superficially endorses the platitudes of patriotism and religion, yet also mercilessly, and without scruple, pursues material and sexual gain. While the comedy is farcical and the lines flippant, there is no mistaking Leonard’s disdain for the new ‘Quality’.

While presenting work on both the London stage and in Dublin, Leonard was also working with the Olney Theatre, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. This relationship led him to write Da (1973), an autobiographical and somewhat experimental play, which brought Leonard not only the commercial success he was by now used to, but also critical approbation, sealed when the play garnered four Tony awards on Broadway. Da was a departure in terms of being a serious and personal play, and it put Leonard’s work on a new level, bringing him a reputation for writing drama of substance as well as levity.

The play is set on the day of Charlie’s father’s funeral, yet when Charlie returns home, it is only to find that his father still sits in his old chair, taunting as well as haunting him. This is not the only element of experiment in the play, as Charlie is in conversation with both his dead father as well as with his younger self. As the critic Anthony Roche puts it, Leonard dramatizes the ‘now and the then and brings the two into dialogue’.³⁹⁷ This contrast brings into focus both the dreams of youth and the realities of old age, and the discrepancies between the two. The past is not so easily left behind and what the play seems to insist on is the necessity of confronting it, no easy task, while the project of resolution seems almost impossible. The autobiographical content of the play meant that Leonard was under public scrutiny now as a character as well as writer, and Charlie’s situation may have been one way of Leonard working through his own return to Ireland. What also emerges from the play is the fact that Charlie – and therefore also Leonard – is adopted, something the writer had previously kept a ‘dark secret’.³⁹⁸ The insecurity of identity that comes across in so many of Leonard’s plays is thus not the dislocation of national identity, the result of losing your native language and culture that is often foregrounded by other Irish playwrights, but the basic and fundamental dislocation of not knowing exactly who you come from, the fear that your original parent might at any moment appear and take you away from all that you know and understand as family. There is thus a bravery to Da that underscores the black humour of the play and makes it, perhaps, Leonard’s most lasting play.

The bi-temporal stage device of Da is not merely a trope of this play but a motif of many of Leonard’s most successful works from Summer (1974), Leonard’s personal favourite among his plays, to A Life (1979), which follows some of the characters Leonard created in Da; the trope appears in Moving (1994), and in his most recent play Love in the Title (1999). What these plays share is not just the formal intrigue of showing more than one time frame; rather they coalesce into an exposition of how both small communities and families, as well as the larger community of Ireland, cope with social change. And in Leonard’s work, this is where the politics are. Despite the fact that he claims to refuse to write issue plays – indeed as Christopher Murray has put it, Leonard rejects the idea of drama as social criticism at all – a strength of his best plays is that Leonard does speak to and about Ireland on a wider level.³⁹⁹ All the bi-temporal works are bent on showing how the past and present interact, throwing into relief where we are now in modern Ireland and where we have come from. And these are critiques that are surprisingly lasting, despite the socio-economic changes of the last fifteen to thirty years. Leonard lambastes the middle-class Irish for their blithe consumerism, the churning up of the Irish countryside for development, the compromising of dreams and ideals. We can hear in Summer, written in 1974, the same kinds of issues being raised by Irish social critics at the beginning of the twenty-first century, concerned that the Celtic Tiger has not in fact generated a prosperous and positive context for all. Indeed, as one of the play’s characters says, ‘instead of poverty we’ve got debts – that’s progress’, which is as easily applicable to current Irish society as it was in the 1970s.⁴⁰⁰ In Act II of Summer, the teenagers have grown up, and one, Louise, is facing separation from her husband and the prospect of raising her child alone. Beyond the play’s commentary on the vulgarity of wealth then, is a real portrait of how families change due to the pressures of personal as well as social and economic shifts. Again, these issues are brought into even greater focus by the changes of the Celtic Tiger period.

Indeed, the durability and persistence of Leonard’s insights into the Dublin middle class go some way to question the idea that the cultural moment of the Celtic Tiger is a major break with the past. What Leonard’s plays clearly demonstrate is that, although the Irish middle class has expanded, making it more visible, it is by no means a new phenomenon. This kind of commentary becomes even more pointed in the later play Moving, which records the shifts in Irish social life over the course of thirty years, from 1957 to 1987. The Noone family in each case is upgrading its house and lifestyle and, with its new, higher status, comes challenges to the integrity of the family as well as the wider social structure. While the pretensions of the Noone family are gently mocked, what is really pinpointed here is the increasing narrowness of social outlook. In 1987, John Turvey, the family’s closest friend and a teacher in the local school, publicly acknowledges that he is gay, an act that alienates the whole community, including Ellie Noone, with a narrow-mindedness that her husband Tom struggles to understand:

Ellie: (Simmering) I mean, the cheek of him. Did he imagine that the town, all the kids’ parents, that they’d thank him?

Tom: No, he thought they might be broad-minded.

Ellie: His mistake, then. (Pause) Do you mean that I’m not? Well, I beg to differ. I happen to think I am.

Tom: Sure you are. Just as long as whatever it is stays on the far side of that door.

Ellie: I never said I was a saint about it.

Tom is about to speak

Nor am I a devil, so don’t make me out to be one. I don’t care what John Turvey is or what he does or doesn’t do. I’m not hard; I just want my peace and quiet. And my children are all I’ve got. The rest of it – the Mini, the holidays, the new house – they’re the carrots that keep this donkey on the road. But no one, not you nor anyone like you, is taking from me the little I have left of those two. Now what you’re going to do is this. You’re going to tell my son to stay away from John Turvey.⁴⁰¹

What Leonard does here is skilful. Ellie is part of the newly powerful and supposedly ‘broad-minded’ middle class. The disturbing aspect of this scene is just how reasonable Ellie sounds, merely wanting to safeguard her children and enjoy their innocence while she still can. The materialism that seems, on the face of it, to define Ellie is not definitive at all, and in dismissing this she seems to dismiss the easy judgements made about her character by the audience. Yet the price of her simple ‘peace and quiet’ is the demonization and exclusion of a former friend from her home and her son’s life on the basis of his sexuality. Though set in the late 1980s, this is a play produced in the era of Mary Robinson, whose presidency is often taken to symbolize the increasing tolerance and open-mindedness of Irish society. But this play insists on the opposite; there is no great enlightenment accompanying greater wealth. This is the ugly, toxic side that is unashamedly there, Leonard implies, below the surface of the new ‘quality’ and the only promise for the future are their educated and unprejudiced children.

The idea that, along with the economic benefits of the Celtic Tiger, there quickly developed a liberalized social outlook, is thus debunked by Leonard with force. The representation of Irish culture that Leonard presents is consistently critical – Ireland is not at heart a liberal, forward-looking culture but is in fact always looking backwards, uncritically indulging its taste for parochialism and nostalgia. This comes through with cutting clarity in the early play The Patrick Pearse Motel, which features, among other highlights, rooms named for Irish patriots: The Robert Emmet Room, The Parnell Room, The Manchester Martyrs’ Room and, lest we forget, The Famine Dining Room. This isn’t just social satire of the bourgeoisie; it lampoons the whole concept of Irish republican nationalism and, beyond that, takes a shot at the full gallery of post-revolutionary Ireland: de Valera, the Catholic Church, and the tendency to glorify the past. The hyperbole of republican nationalism that Leonard spotlights in this early play is focussed on even more in Kill (1982), a clear political allegory, in which Mort Mongan is a sinister representative of the IRA. While the preface to the play clearly points out that it is ‘a comedy, not a tract’, Leonard also makes it clear that the play is aimed at ‘harpooning’ Irish ‘indifference [towards] or partisanship on the side of the terrorists.’⁴⁰²

Leonard is critical of what he perceives as a blinkered and destructive republican nationalist vision of Ireland, and he does not hold back. Indeed, it would be out of character for him to be less than devastatingly caustic. Not only is Leonard determined to ‘out’ Irish attitudes towards the North and the ‘three faces of post-revolutionary Ireland: the gunman-as-statesman; the new “Quality”; and the Church’,⁴⁰³ he is also bent on questioning the extent to which Irish theatre, indeed the Irish arts in general, foster some of the worst and most narrow concepts of Ireland and Irishness. Delivering a paper in 1988 under the title ‘The Unimportance of Being Irish’, Leonard protested against the isolationism of so much of Irish art, against what he termed the ‘cultural apartheid’ of thinking of drama in national terms first and artistic or human terms second, and he links the celebration of Irish identity in Irish writing to the activities of Irish terrorists in Northern Ireland.⁴⁰⁴ And it is not just the art that Leonard critiques, but the ‘parochial’ attitude towards Irish writing of so many of its critics.⁴⁰⁵ When ‘a sense of nationality is the guiding factor in a discussion of art, one usually becomes aware of a society with a problem of identity, or with a culture that is as yet relatively unknown outside its frontiers.’⁴⁰⁶ While the latter is not a problem for Irish culture, the implication is that in the late 1980s, despite over sixty years of independence, Ireland was still insecure in its identity.

Leonard’s agenda is, ultimately, to write good plays and entertain an audience ‘for a couple of hours’.⁴⁰⁷ Yet there is also that ‘underlying seriousness’ of agenda, responding to the changes in the Irish social condition. As Leonard says:

If Joyce could distil the events of one unremarkable day into literature, a lesser writer might validly make use of everyday life to depict a schizoid society caught between two worlds … caught because we have been unable to make the transition. To survive, we must embrace a new life and new values, and yet to do so is a betrayal of the past.⁴⁰⁸

Though Leonard is careful to distinguish himself from Joyce, displaying his own particular insecurities perhaps, he is clear on the fractured nature of Irish society and the complex negotiations facing contemporary Ireland between the certainties of the past and an increasingly globalized future. This is at odds with Leonard’s insistence elsewhere that he refuses to write plays that say ‘Something’ with a capital ‘S’.⁴⁰⁹ But as critics, we have the ability to reconcile these two elements: it is not an oxymoron that a playwright can both entertain and archive Irish society.

To read the press clippings concerning Leonard over the period of the last thirty years is to notice a shift in the critical view of both the plays and the playwright. In 1979 when A Life was the hit of the Dublin Theatre Festival – and after Brian Friel’s Faith Healer had closed on Broadway with the faint whiff of failure – Leonard was deemed to be Ireland’s leading playwright, a master of ‘devastating insight’.⁴¹⁰ Not only did he manage to generate advance publicity and ticket sales – an accolade in this particular year, when the Festival vied with the visit of the Pope for public attention – but the critics piled on the plaudits too. It is easy looking back to imagine a different future for Leonard’s critical reputation, one that involves lasting acclaim and academic scholarship. But fifteen years later, it is another story; Friel is the playwright of maturity and gravitas while Leonard’s farces have worn thin. In 1994, both Friel and Leonard had plays opening within just nights of each other. But where Friel’s Molly Sweeney was greeted with strong reviews, Leonard’s double bill Chamber Music got much less favourable press. Though Jocelyn Clarke noted the play’s ‘keen and lacerating intelligence’ the majority of the reviews gave the play, particularly the first half about an unbreakable chamber pot, a thorough, and perhaps deserved, mauling.⁴¹¹ Of little compensation must have been the positive New York Times review of the play, which appreciated the humour but only judged Leonard to be ‘Ireland’s most accomplished living playwright, after Friel’.⁴¹²

It is intriguing that as Ireland became more prosperous and increasingly like the bourgeois caricatures that Leonard so often presents us with, he became less popular as a playwright. While no-one assumes that the main audience for a Friel play is made up of nineteenth-century hedge school pupils, that kind of assumption is often made about Leonard’s audience, as if his plays are only of value and interest to the demographic that he represents on stage. Yet such plays as Moving tell us uncomfortable truths about our families and our society. These are stories about ourselves now, yet this is a play which seems to have escaped any serious critical attention. And it raises the question as to whether Irish critics are just not ready to take comedy seriously, to consider it alongside the realist canon. When interviewed in 1969, Leonard expressed an anxiety about not being ‘regarded even as an Irish writer anymore’ because of his place in the British ‘scene’.⁴¹³ These anxieties seem to have been quelled after his return home and the penning of some of his classic plays; in a piece on the success of A Life at the Festival in 1979 one reviewer commented that Leonard had ‘at last nailed the myth that the prophet is never received in his own country’.⁴¹⁴ But this reception has not endured.

Leonard’s resolute rejection of republican nationalism and his mocking tone, combined with his love of farce and his appeal to ‘Dublin’s smoked salmon belt’, may go some way towards explaining his marginal position in the Irish theatrical canon.⁴¹⁵ Yet many of Leonard’s plays could stand within the canon. Director Joe Dowling argues that the production of Leonard’s adaptation Stephen D. was one of the seminal moments in 1960s Irish theatre, along with Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). Indeed, it can be argued that in its focus on the psyche of a young man coming of age, preparing to emigrate and reject those ‘four great “F”s’ of Ireland, as well as in its staging, Stephen D. paved the way for Friel’s work two years later. Because of this shared ability to reach audiences and to push at the boundaries of the Irish dramatic canon, Dowling argues that in the 1960s and 1970s Leonard and Friel stood as the two ‘great, great men’ of Irish playwriting.⁴¹⁶ And while it would be unproductive to labour the comparison with Friel, there are some striking similarities in their careers: not only do they make their critical breakthrough in the same decade, but two of their best-known plays, Philadelphia and Da, are about the conflict between father and son and utilize formal experimentation to convey the inner self of the son. Further, both playwrights have adapted work by others, both are popular in Ireland and abroad, particularly America, and the work of both writers seems rooted in distinctive places. But Friel’s sense of place comes from the rural – Ballybeg – while Leonard’s home place is Dalkey and the rich suburbs of Dublin. And, crucially, Leonard writes comedy. Though such critics as Fintan O’Toole have objected to the idea that Leonard, along with Bernard Farrell, are ‘undervalued by Irish critics because they are funny’, there is something to the argument, when O’Toole goes on to say that Leonard should emphasize the political satire and minimize the farce.⁴¹⁷ It is not just that farce is an underrated genre in Ireland, but also that over-the-top satire and farce do not fit with the Field Day-inflected idea of Irish theatre that has so dominated for nearly thirty years. Leonard’s tone, aesthetic, and emphasis on the bourgeoisie do not accord with the Irish peasant, or even Big House, version of Irishness so beloved of critics and postcolonial scholars. Indeed, while Leonard is mentioned in D.E.S. Maxwell’s ‘Introduction’ to the Contemporary Drama 1953-1986 section of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, none of his work is actually anthologized.⁴¹⁸ The dependence of the Irish dramatic canon on realist and naturalist works that address the national condition and that lend themselves to being read allegorically, means that writers like Leonard, as well as for example, many female writers who focus on the domestic sphere, are simply not considered serious or national in the same way. Yet in many ways writers like Leonard, while recording the details of a particular time or a class of Irish society, also reflect a general humanity, which is what makes Leonard, if not a canonical playwright then a wonderful Festival playwright.

Hugh Leonard has been inextricably bound up with the history of Irish drama for over fifty years, producing ‘quintessential Irish play[s]’.⁴¹⁹ Underneath the caustic wit there is an intimate understanding of human nature that is the mark of a master craftsman. And, crucially, there is an audience for Leonard’s plays that otherwise do not often go to the theatre. Yet these two aspects of his career – his universalism and his commercialism – are all too often praised with just a shade too snide a tone, though they are exactly the qualities which make him an ideal Festival playwright, if we imagine that the Festival is about drama that engages across political and linguistic boundaries. Indeed, in 1979, when Leonard presided as Programme Director of the Festival, he argued that one of the best elements of the international event was that it ‘promotes an awareness of Irish theatre abroad to people who only know us for our three undisputed masterpieces: Juno, The Plough and The Playboy’.⁴²⁰ Thus in his role as Programme Director, Leonard developed a ‘policy’ that was ‘simple. I want to present as many kinds of play as there are audiences’, to respond to the challenge of a ‘catholic taste’.⁴²¹ And while I think this is a policy that has stood the test of time at the Festival, perhaps it is time to put it to good use when considering the canon of Irish drama.

Extract From: Interactions: Dublin Theatre Festival 1957-2007, edited by Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan with Lilian Chambers (2008)

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

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