Actors, playwrights, critics and directors were among the large crowd who turned out last night to pay tribute to "one of Ireland's great writers", Hugh Leonard, who celebrated his 80th birthday on Friday.
Some 300 people attended the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire to mark the prolific career of Jack Keyes Byrne, who "took the pseudonym Hugh Leonard from one of his plays and it brought him luck, so he kept it on", said playwright Bernard Farrell, one of the night's organisers.
The event was hosted jointly by the Abbey Theatre, the Dalkey Heritage Centre and the arts department of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.
"We wanted to mark the occasion for Jack and do it in the borough", said Mr Farrell.
"I first met him in 1980 when I had a play in the Abbey and felt I knew him well through his plays and journalism. We both had the same concern about the cant and pretension of society," he said.
Extracts from some of his most famous works including Love in the Title, his autobiography Home Before Night, Da, and A Life were performed by actors including Des Cave, John Kavanagh, Anita Reeves and Ingrid Craigie, with singing by tenor Karl Scully and soprano Anna Devin.
Master of ceremonies, David Kelly, described the star of the night as "a dear and gifted friend, irreplaceable, incomparable".
The birthday boy himself was only informed of the event last week and was accompanied by his partner, Kathy Hayes, and daughter Danielle. When he entered the Pavilion's auditorium, he received a sustained standing ovation.
Playwright Frank McGuinness described him as "one of Ireland's great writers. He has chronicled the changes in this country more accurately than anyone else. He's a great political writer who never lost sight of the fact that the community is at the heart of drama. He's a radical visionary who never got the credit for that."
Patrick Mason, who directed the actors in last night's entertainment, described him as "one of the best all-round practitioners of Irish theatre. It's a great body of work," he said of his plays, novels, adaptations and journalism. "There are the stand-outs like Da and the political satires but, as an overall body of work, it is fantastic."
