Depending on the device that you are using, you may see less or more of the background image for this this site, so it is illustrated in full above .  This old photograph  – it looks 100 or more years old –  is taken from the top of Sorrento Park in Dalkey, looking down on the bandstand with Dalkey hill in the background.  HL’s play A Life opens with the principal character Drumm addressing an unseen audience “To conclude. I have chose to terminate today’s walk in this park which is remarkable for its view of sea and mountains, such as may have inspired Bernard Shaw’s observation that whereas Ireland’s men are temporal, her hills are eternal.  Any child familiar with the rudiments of geology could have told him otherwise, but then even Shaw was not immune to his country men’s passion for inexactitude.  These few acres have more than a scenic claim on our attention.  This hillside is all that remains of what was called the Commons of Dalkey…”

Leonard’s one act play A View from the Obelisk is set on Killiney Hill that can be seen in the distance on the left.

The photograph in the page “About Hugh Leonard” is a rediscovery kindly supplied by a friend of the playwright.  He is seen working in his office, a studio in the garden of his house in Killiney, in an image from the early 1970s.  This is the desk he wrote at for nearly 50 years.  To the left of the door, you can just about see his Prix Italia awarded in 1967 for the television play Silent Song.

This site uses the WordPress theme “The Columnist” – chosen for its magazine format but a nice verbal fit with the subject.  The monochrome in these initial illustrations picks up on Hugh Leonard’s important work in the early years of television and his love of old fillums.