Bøker av Hugh Leonard

Middle-aged assimilated American Charlie returns home to his native Dublin to sort through and come to terms with his relationship to this thoroughly beguiling, maddening presence in his life: "Da". Reminiscence gives way to memory and illusion as an adolescent 'Charlie Then' is brought back from the past, while the man who is 'Charlie Now' grapples with his own mortality and the part of his life that will always be the irrasicible "Da". A great success in its original Broadway production, subsequent revivals have proven this play a classic.

When Katie arrives in the field of Corcamore to paint a watercolor of the legendary stone of Clough E. Regan, she is accompanied by youthful versions of her mother and grandmother. Katie exists in the present while the others are in their own time. Their conversations companionable and hostile by turns reveal family history and its intricate relation to the wider story of Irish culture.3 women

It is 1957 and the Noone family is moving into a new house in Dublin. Presiding over the event is the Removals Man, who steps in and out of the action to explain the characters and their stories. The second half of the play is set in 1987 and the same family, no older than before, is moving into an even better house, their new relationships reflecting the revolutions that have taken place in family life in the intervening years.|4 women, 5 men

Three married couples, accompanied by the son of one and daughter of another, assemble on a hill near Dublin to picnic. During the afternoon the various relationships between them, on the surface and beneath it, become apparent, while the young people regard their elders somewhat sardonically across the generation gap. Six years pass, and the group come together again - but the place has changed, as they have. In their various ways all show the passage of the years.|4 women, 4 men

When her husband Dermond plans to be away in Cork with his partner Fintan, Grainne decided to seize the opportunity of spending the night with an ex flame, now a TV personality. She also involves the partner's wife, Niamh, in the plot. Things begin to go wrong when Niamh's furiously jealous husband returns unexpectedly and finds her performing what seems to him to be an exceedingly compromising task. Matters are further complicated by the new manageress of the new motel turning out to be the spurned love of the TV personality.3 women, 4 men

In A Life this intriguing character is at the end of his life and setting his emotional accounts in order. Two casts represent the young and the old Desmond Drumm, his simple and loving wife, and the one true love of his life, who rejected him for a lovable ne'er do well. Now near death and isolated from the world by his "high principles," Drumm comes to realize he has never given his life or the people in it, a chance.5 women, 3 men

Pizzazz consists of three plays intended solely as entertainment. If they have a theme in common, it is that each one deals with travellers - near Dublin, in Rome and on the Shannon - who are apart from their natural environment. Another quality in common is perhaps suggested by the original composite title Scorpions.-3 women, 2 men

Young Philip Pirrip, known as "Pip", helps the escaped convict Abel Magwitch and sets in motion a train of events that will affect his entire young life. This is an adaptation of Charles Dickens' classic novel of the same name.

A trilogy of plays: A Time of Wolves and Tigers, Nothing Personal and The Last of the Last of the Mohicans. If the plays are performed separately, individual fee codes apply.|3 women, 4 men

Dublin, the 1960s. After Da's funeral, Charlie returns to his childhood home only to find his father's ghost stubbornly unwilling to leave. As the events of Charlie's youth and Da's troubled relationship with Mother are replayed, we discover the relationships that existed between father and son.

This second volume of autobiography is a portrait of adolescence in Dublin in the 1940s and 1950s. Leonard stirs in theatre ancedotes, vignettes of Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan and divulges his own beginnings as a writer. The result is a humorous analysis of Dublin and Dubliners.