“Clowning”

As a playwright Hugh Leonard was self-taught.  Some of this education was conducted with the assistance of the works of the 20^th century British theatre critics James Agate (pronounced Ay-gat) and Kenneth Tynan. But he admired Agate as an essayist as much as an instructor and he came to love the essay form.  When traveling Leonard kept in his jacket pocket a slim volume of essays by 19^th century critic William Hazlitt (often forgotten that he too was Irish); the title of Leonard’s first novel A Wild People, was taken from Hazlitt.

In return Leonard wrote reviews of plays, television and books over the course of his working life.  He was the Dublin correspondent of Plays & Players magazine in the 1950s and, when he moved to London in the 1960s, became a regular reviewer for that magazine, mainly of classical theatre and musicals – but occasionally of new work. The editor Peter Roberts later observed “Jack’s first feature review… was of the National Theatre’s revival at the Old Vic of Hay Fever by Noel Coward who, Jack noted, ‘sat at the back of the dress circle looking like the 13th Caesar’. Some eyebrows were raised at this and other trenchant comments of his about fellow writers under the assertion that dog does not eat dog”. Leonard’s reviews of course make entertaining reading. He plays with Henry James’ verbose The Outcry by writing the review as a 200 word single sentence.  As a playwright he is able to identify the power and the flaws of, for example, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. He dissects A Flea in Her Ear: ” What fascinates me most about Feydeau is his thrift. Every by-product of the main action is put to use: nothing is wasted and, at the end of the play, the plot has been picked as clean as a bone”. And he duly eviscerates plays that he finds lacking, for example Robert Bolt’s Gentle Jack:

“The dialogue is so tentative that one must concentrate to the point of getting a splintering headache, but the meaning of any one sequence remains elusive, rather as if Mr. Bolt had filleted each sentence before sending it to the retailer. Either this, or his play is disastrously underwritten: the characters are so two dimensional that there is no performance which is more than competent notwithstanding the presence of voluminous cast which includes Dame Edith (Evans), Michael Bryant, Sian Phillips, and Kenneth Williams… “

Today Leonard’s journalism is associated with his Sunday Independent satirical column which he wrote for some 30 years until his death.  His entry in the Irish Dictionary of Biography observes:

“ Over time, personal reminiscence became increasingly prominent in Leonard’s column. These were not, however, the features for which it was best known. From the outbreak of the Northern Ireland troubles, Leonard passionately denounced the violence of the Provisional IRA, accusing successive governments, and Irish society generally, of combining hypocritical condemnation of violence with unwillingness to take effective action against terrorists because they were secretly regarded as ‘our own’. He saw this attitude as particularly exemplified by the career of Charles Haughey, to whom he annually awarded the title ‘gobshite of the year’ (except in 1985, when the title was awarded to God for failing to drown Haughey when his yacht sank in September 1985) .…”

Anthologies of Leonard’s Sunday Indo columns were published in Dublin and are listed elsewhere on this site. In summary his “clowning” work comprised: