Hugh Leonard is back with an adaptation and an original play. When he's not busy writing, he's 'mending a few fences', he tells Sara Keating
Hugh Leonard's reputation precedes him, like a defence guard leading the way. There is the history of infamous spats with peers and rivals to contend with. The barbed wit so fluently and flagrantly exercised in his Sunday Independent columns. Not to mention his notoriously protective attitude towards his prolific volume of plays and prose. However, the cat-loving "curmudgeon" seems more like a tom cat than a tiger. After 81 years of life, the spark of stubborn vitality still flickers around an uncomfortable question, but Leonard is, for the most part, a willing, almost professional, interviewee. It seems that the dual identity of the writer who renamed himself after a character in one of his own plays is more than skin deep.
Leonard has an enormous body of work, which has been widely loved by audiences worldwide but overlooked somewhat in critical circles. Despite the technical experiments of plays such as Da and A Life, the sharp social satires of The Patrick Pearse Motel and Moving, the reflected social history of Irish life in Love in the Title and Summer, Leonard has been largely dismissed as a writer of gentle, middle-class living-room comedy, as if laughter were somehow easily earned.
However, as Leonard explains, "[ the critics] trot out adjectives like 'flippant' or 'frivolous', but I take my plays very seriously indeed. And as for being [ criticised for] handling a theme rather lightly or not being a political writer, well I know nothing about politics and have no interest in that sort of thing. As James Cagney used to say, 'that's just not the kind of hairpin I am'."
Yet some of Leonard's finest work can be read as a serious engagement with changes in Ireland over the last 40 years, providing an alternative anatomy of the nation through the lives of middle-class urbanites rather than rural-dwelling peasants.
"In my plays," Leonard insists, "I think I write about a society that's changing, and not always for the better."
IT IS THE small community of Dalkey, where Leonard grew up and still resides, that seems to have served as a microcosm for exploring these changes, although Leonard believes that "the connection with Dalkey has been foisted upon me, because my most famous play, Da, is set there. But I like to think of [ the places] in my plays as anyplaces, anywheres. Brian Friel has Ballybeg and it is rather the same thing in my plays. A single place is common to most of my work, but it is not a real place. What I like to write about is a society that is in flux. Even when I wrote my autobiography, Home Before Night, even that wasn't really about me. It was about a place that is vanishing and soon wouldn't exist any more. It doesn't exist any more."
Changes in the real Dalkey have merely given Leonard fuel for exploring these changes in his fictional work. "Dalkey used to be a village. Now it's a car park. Joyce could go down Talbot Street and name every shop. You could do the same thing with Dalkey once upon a while, but there's no point in memorising shops now because they'll be gone tomorrow. It has gotten chic - that terrible word."
Success is another terrible word, perhaps not for Leonard himself, but certainly for a nation of famous begrudgers, many of whom have seen Leonard's commercial success as a reason for dismissing him as a "popular author" rather than a dramatic artist.
In reference to this begrudgery, Leonard quotes Noel Coward's barb about the "British hatred of success", but he is happy to admit that he loved the red-carpet treatment he got in the US when Da won four Tony awards in 1978 and played on Broadway for almost two years. Reaction in Ireland, however, was "more muted. There's a great story about that: Brendan Smith (founder of the Dublin Theatre Festival) went to Jack Lynch, who was taoiseach at the time, and said: 'Don't you think we should have a guard of honour for Hugh when he comes back with the Tony?' Jack Lynch said: 'No. I don't think that's called for - if he was a [ member of a] winning hurling team then there would have been reason for it, but it's only a play.' I didn't really mind, though. I was the first Irish writer to get a Tony. It's not up to me to boast about it, but it did mean a lot at the time."
WHILE THE CRITICAL success of Da was confirmation for the writer mid-career, Leonard could certainly not be accused of over-valuing it. As he succinctly puts it: "I was doing okay before then."
Having cut his teeth on television plays in the 1960s - "commuting to Manchester every week, and sneaking off on Thursdays for a long weekend" - Leonard was steadily writing an original play every year, and an adaptation every other, much of it premiering annually at the Dublin Theatre Festival ("I didn't regard a festival as a festival unless I had something in it").
Anyway, it has always been the audience rather than the critics that Leonard has looked to for confirmation. "Of course I read reviews. Anyone who says they don't, well, their nose will get longer and longer until it falls off. Of course you are curious about reviews, but only in the commercial sense: you want to know if the public likes it, if the play is going to run. But on aesthetic grounds I don't bother with [ reviews] at all. Usually the person gets the meaning totally wrong, and sees another play than the one you wrote."
Academic investigation of his plays he finds similarly irksome. "I never read anything [ academics] say about my work. I think 'that's not what the play is about', and I have to get up in disgust." Leonard's defences seem to apply to posterity too. "I don't keep anything: letters, playbills. I pity anyone who tries to write my biography." And the valiant writer who might try would have an ever-increasing mountain of work to wade through too, as Leonard's new full-length original play - his 25th - Magicality, is currently being optioned in London after being turned down by the Abbey ("Fiach [Mac Conghail, Abbey director] said that it wasn't the kind of play that they wanted at the moment, but that they admired it greatly").
In fact, Leonard insists that he is "busier than I have ever been. I think I'll have to give up the idea of retiring altogether. But my working day has shrivelled and I can only work in the afternoons now. That makes it more difficult. As you grow older you get slower, but your output, for what it's worth, is just as good."
HIS ONLY REGRET as he reflects on his life is "that I haven't done more work than I've done".
Apart from writing, Leonard is busy "mending a few fences. I have got a very short fuse, and I'm inclined to blow up. But when [ an argument] is over, it's over. Michael Colgan and I were not on speaking terms for a long time, but recently we started talking again. He wanted to get me to agree to do Great Expectations at the Gate; I wanted him to do Great Expectations at the Gate. We met for lunch, neither of us knowing what the other one had in his mind. But we never discussed what the argument [ between us] was and we never will. That's the way all quarrels should be. And there are other fences there too to be mended, but I'm not the one who [ broke] them. There are probably two people who wouldn't talk to me at all again, which is not a bad record when you're my age."
Great Expectations is one of his favourite adaptations for the stage, what with its "immortal characters" and its involvement of the audience in the story - "I hate Bertold Brecht", he says with vehemence, "an audience should always be involved."
And his greatest achievement? He cites his 1974 play, Summer.
"It was the most difficult play to write. But I brought it off. The German dramaturg Gotthold Lessing said that in a good play every character is in the right, and in Summer the characters are all fallible, but nobody is bad. That is an important thing to remember" - and I can't help but think of that fearsome reputation again - "There are no villains in life."
Great Expectations opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday
"The problem with Ireland is that it's a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent"
- On the unimportance of being Irish
"Pardon me if I say that I find little that is universal in the contemplation of the navel that passes for much of our literature . . . [ It is] a literature that has many of the aspects of cultural apartheid"
- On Irish writing
"I've always enjoyed a woman's company more than men's. They're usually better-looking"
- On friendship
"Cogito Ergo Sum. I am a cog, therefore I am"
- On the philosophy of life in the Civil Service in A Life
"When you can see the Mountains of Mourne, that's a sure sign it'll rain. Yis, the angels'll be havin' a pee . . . a group of winged figures standing around a hole in the clouds relieving themselves"
- On the weather in Da
"It would gall me more if he was any good at it"
- On his old arch-enemy Gay Byrne, who took over his Sunday Independent column