Byrne, John Keyes 1926-

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BYRNE, John Keyes 1926-

(Hugh Leonard)

PERSONAL: Born November 9, 1926, near Dublin, Ireland; son of Nicholas Keyes (a gardener) and Margaret (Doyle) Byrne; married Paule Jacquet, May 28, 1955; children: Danielle. Education: Attended Presentation Colllege, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, 1941-45. Religion: "Lapsed Catholic."

ADDRESSES: Home—Theros, Coliemore Rd., Dalkey County, Dublin, Ireland. Office—6 Rossaun, Pilot View, Dalkey County, Dublin, Ireland. Agent—Harvey Unna, 14 Beaumont Mews, Marylebone High St., London W1N 4HE, England.

CAREER: Author, playwright, and screenwriter. Department of Lands, Dublin, Ireland, civil servant, 1945-59; Granada Television, Manchester, England, script editor, 1961-63; freelance writer in London, England, 1963-70; Plays and Players, drama critic, 1964-72; Hibernia, weekly columnist, 1973-76; Abbey Theatre, Dublin, literary editor, 1976-77; Sunday Independent Ireland, weekly columnist, 1977—; Dublin Theatre Festival, program director, 1978-80.

MEMBER: Dramatists' Club (London, England), Players (New York, NY).

AWARDS, HONORS: Italia Prize, International Concourse for Radio and Television, and Writers Guild of Great Britain award of merit, both 1967, both for Silent Song; Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award nominee for best play, 1974, for The Au Pair Man; Tony Award for best play, New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play, Drama Desk Award for outstanding new play, and Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding play, all 1978, all for Da; Harvey Award for A Life.

WRITINGS:

UNDER PSEUDONYM HUGH LEONARD

Leonard's Last Book (essays), Egotist Press (Enniskerry, Ireland), 1978.

A Peculiar People (essays), Tansy Books (Enniskerry, Ireland), 1979.

Home before Night: Memoirs of an Irish Time and Place (autobiography), Deutsch (London, England), 1979, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1980.

Suburb of Babylon, S. French (New York, NY), 1983.

Leonard's Year (journalism), Canavaun (Dublin, Ireland), 1985.

Leonard's Log, illustrated by Jim Cogan, Brophy Books (Dublin, Ireland), 1987.

Out after Dark (memoirs), Deutsch (London, England), 1989.

Parnell and the Englishwoman, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1991.

Selected Plays of Hugh Leonard, chosen, and with an introduction by S. F. Gallagher, Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC), 1992.

Rover and other Cats (essays), Deutsch (London, England), 1992.

Dear Paule (letters), Mercier Press (Cork, Ireland), 2001.

A Wild People (novel), Methuen (London, England), 2001.

Also author of The Off-Off-Shore Island, 1993.

PLAYS

The Italian Road (two-act play), produced in Dublin, 1954.

The Big Birthday, produced in Dublin at Abbey Theatre, 1956.

A Leap in the Dark (two-act play), produced in Dublin at Abbey Theatre, 1957.

Madigan's Lock (two-act play; produced in Dublin at Globe Theatre, 1958; produced in London, 1963; produced in Olney, MD, 1970), Brophy Books (Dublin, Ireland), 1987.

A Walk on the Water, produced in Dublin at Eblana Theatre, 1960.

The Passion of Peter McGinty (two-act play; adaptation of Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen), produced in Dublin at Gate Theatre, 1961.

Stephen D. (two-act play; adaptation of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Stephen Hero by James Joyce; produced in Dublin at Gate Theatre, 1962; produced in London at St. Martin's Theatre, 1963; produced in New York, NY, 1967), M. Evans (New York, NY), 1962.

Dublin One (two-act play; adaptation of Dubliners by James Joyce), produced in Dublin at the Dublin Theatre Festival, 1963.

The Poker Session (produced in Dublin at Gate Theatre, 1963; produced in London at Globe Theatre, 1964; produced in New York, NY, 1967), M. Evans (New York, NY), 1964.

The Family Way (two-act play; adaptation of Eugene Marin Labiche's play), produced in Dublin, 1964, produced in London, 1966.

The Late Arrival of the Incoming Aircraft (one-act play; adaptation of Leonard's television play), M. Evans (New York, NY), 1968.

The Saints Go Cycling In (two-act play; adaptation of The Dalkey Archives by Flann O'Brien), produced in Dublin at Dublin Theatre Festival, 1965.

Mick and Mick (two-act play; produced in Dublin at Dublin Theatre Festival, 1966; produced as All the Nice People in Olney, MD, 1976), S. French (New York, NY), 1966.

The Quick, and the Dead (two-act play), produced in Dublin, 1967.

The Au Pair Man (three-act play; produced in Dublin at Dublin Theatre Festival, 1968; produced in London, 1969; produced in New York, NY, 1973), S. French (London, England), 1974.

The Barracks (two-act; adaptation of novel by John McGahern), produced in Dublin, 1969.

The Patrick Pearse Motel (two-act play; produced in Dublin at Olympia Theatre, 1971; produced in London, 1971; produced in Washington, DC, 1972), S. French (London, England), 1971.

Da (two-act play; produced in Olney, MD, 1973; produced in Dublin at Olympia Theatre, 1973; produced on Broadway, 1978), Proscenium Press (Newark, DE), 1975.

Summer (two-act play; produced in Olney, MD, 1974; produced in Dublin at Olympia Theatre, 1974; produced in London at Watford Palace Theatre, 1979; produced Off-Broadway, 1980), S. French (New York, NY), 1979.

Suburb of Babylon (contains A Time of Wolves and Tigers, Nothing Personal, and The Last of the Last Mohicans; produced as Irishmen in Olney, MD, 1975; produced in Dublin, 1975), S. French (New York, NY), 1983.

Some of My Best Friends Are Husbands (two-act play; adaptation of play by Eugene Marin Labiche), produced in London, 1976.

Liam Liar (two-act play; adaptation of Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall), produced in Dublin, 1976.

Time Was (two-act play; produced in Dublin at Abbey Theatre, December 21, 1976), Penguin (New York, NY), 1981.

A Life (two-act play; produced in Dublin at Abbey Theatre, 1979; produced on Broadway, 1980; produced Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre, 2001), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1981.

Kill, produced in Dublin at the Dublin Theatre Festival, 1982; produced in New York, NY, 1986.

Scorpions (contains A View from the Obelisk, Roman Fever, and Pizzazz; also see below), produced in Dublin at the Dublin Theatre Festival, 1983.

Pizzazz, S. French (New York, NY), 1986.

The Mask of Moriarty (based on characters by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; produced in Dublin at the Dublin Theatre Festival, 1985), Brophy Books (Dublin, Ireland), 1987.

Moving (produced in Dublin at Abbey Theatre, 1992), S. French (New York, NY), 1994.

Love in the Title: A Play (produced in Dublin at Abbey Theatre, 1999), S. French (London, England), 2000.

Also author of plays Moving Days, 1981; Good Behavior, 1983; O'Neill, 1983; Senna for Sonny, 1994; The Lily Lally Show, 1994; and Magic, 1997.

SCREENPLAYS

Great Catherine (adaptation of play by George Bernard Shaw), Warner Brothers, 1968.

(With Lee Langley) Interlude, Columbia, 1968.

Whirligig, 1970.

(With Terence Feely) Percy (adaptation of novel by Raymond Hitchcock), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1971.

Our Miss Fred, EMI, 1972.

Herself Surprised, 1977.

Widows' Peak, 1986.

Da, FilmDallas, 1988.

Mattie, 1998.

RADIO PLAYS

The Kennedys of Castleross (series).

Ending It, 1976.

TELEVISION PLAYS

The Irish Boys (trilogy), 1962.

A Kind of Kingdom, 1963.

The Second Wall, 1964.

A Triple Irish, 1964.

Realm of Error, 1964.

My One True Love, 1964.

The Late Arrival of the Incoming Aircraft, 1964.

Do You Play Requests?, 1964.

A View from the Obelisk, 1964.

I Loved You Last Summer, 1965.

Great Big Blond, 1965.

The Lodger [and] The Judge, 1966.

Insurrection, 1966.

Second Childhood, 1966.

The Retreat, 1966.

Silent Song (adapted from a story by Frank O'Connor), 1966.

A Time of Wolves and Tigers, 1967.

Love Life, 1967.

Great Expectations (adaptation of the novel by Charles Dickens), 1967.

Wuthering Heights (adaptation of the novel by Emily Brontë), 1967.

No Such Thing As a Vampire, 1968.

The Egg on the Face of the Tiger, Independent (ITV), 1968.

The Corpse Can't Play, 1968.

A Man and His Mother-in-Law, 1968.

Assassin, 1968.

Nicholas Nickleby (adaptation of the novel by Charles Dickens), 1968.

A Study in Scarlet (adaptation of a story by Arthur Conan Doyle), 1968.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (adaptation of a story by Arthur Conan Doyle), 1968.

(With H. R. Keating) Hunt the Peacock, 1969.

Talk of Angels, 1969.

The Possessed (adaptation of the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky), 1969.

Dombey and Son (adaptation of the novel by Charles Dickens), British Broadcasting Corp (BBC-TV), 1969.

P and O (adaptation of a story by Somerset Maugham), 1969.

Jane (adaptation of a story by Somerset Maugham), 1970.

A Sentimental Education (adaptation of a story by Gustave Flaubert), 1970.

White Walls and Olive Green Carpets, 1971.

The Removal Person, 1971.

Pandora, Granada Television, 1971.

The Virgins, 1972.

The Ghost of Christmas Present, 1972.

The Truth Game, 1972.

The Moonstone (adaptation of the novel by Wilkie Collins), 1972.

The Sullen Sisters, 1972.

The Watercress Girl (adaptation of a story by H. E. Bates), 1972.

The Higgler, 1973.

High Kampf, 1973.

Milo O'Shea, 1973.

Stone Cold Sober, 1973.

The Bitter Pill, 1973.

Another Fine Mess, 1973.

Judgment Day, 1973.

The Traveling Woman, 1973.

The Hammer of God, 1974.

The Actor and the Alibi, 1974.

The Eye of Apollo, 1974.

The Forbidden Garden, 1974.

The Three Tools of Death, 1974.

The Quick One, 1974.

London Belongs to Me (adaptation of the novel by Norman Collins), 1977.

Bitter Suite, 1977.

Teresa, The Fur Coat, and Two of a Kind (adaptations of stories by Sean O'Faolain), 1977.

The Last Campaign (adaptation of the novel The Captains and the Kings, by Jennifer Johnston), 1978.

The Ring and the Rose, 1978.

Strumpet City (adaptation of the novel by James Plunkett), 1980.

The Little World of Don Camillo (adaptation of the novel by Giovanni Guareschi), BBC-TV, 1980.

The Slab Boys, Scottish Society of Playwrights (Glasgow, Scotland), 1981.

Kill, 1982.

Good Behavior (adaptation of work by Molly Keane), 1982.

O'Neill, 1983.

Beyond the Pale, 1984.

The Irish RM, 1985.

Hunted Down (adaptation of a story by Charles Dickens), 1985.

Troubles, 1987.

Parnell and the Englishwoman, 1991.

The Celadon Cup, 1993.

Writer for television series Saki, Jezebel Ex-UK, The Hidden Truth, Undermine, Blackmail, Public Eye, The Liars, The Informer, Out of the Unknown, Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, The Sinners, Me Mammy, Tales from the Lazy Acre, Sweeney, Country Matters, and Father Brown.

SIDELIGHTS: Irish playwright, screenwriter, and novelist John Keyes Byrne, who writes under the name Hugh Leonard, is known for his wickedly humorous story lines that focus on humanity's dark nature. At his birth in Dublin, he was named John Byrne; following his adoption by a working-class family, he began using his adoptive father's name, "Keyes," as his middle name. Byrne began his writing career as a civil servant in the Department of Lands. While with the department, he became involved with amateur theater and began writing for and about the stage. Byrne's pseudonym, Hugh Leonard, is the name of a character in his first play, The Italian Road, which was originally rejected by the Abbey Theatre. After three of his plays were staged in Dublin, he became a professional writer, drafting serious dramas as well as scripts for television and films.

Since 1960 Byrne's plays have been staged nearly every year at the Dublin Theatre Festival. Among Byrne's numerous plays are The Au Pair Man, The Patrick Pearce Motel, Da, A Life, and Love in the Title. Jeremy Kingston called Byrne's play, The Au Pair Man, a "witty social parable" in which the author pokes fun at the British. The comedy revolves around Mrs. Elizabeth Rogers, whose initials indicate she is a parody of Queen Elizabeth (Elizabeth Regina). Her poverty-stricken but royal residence is soon invaded by a gauche young Irish debt collector endeavoring to reclaim a wall-unit. Considering how valuable this unit is to her, Mrs. Rogers seduces the young man and gradually transforms him into a personage possessing social grace. A Variety critic noted that the play "shows the British Empire crumbling but defiantly clinging to its outworn past, arrogant, broke, but still loftily trying to ignore the new world and control 'the peasants.'" He added: "Some of [Byrne's] dialog has the air of secondhand Oscar Wilde, but he provides . . . many splendid flights of fancy and airy persiflage."

A more recent play, The Patrick Pearce Motel, met with an enthusiastic reception. Critics praised the work for its artful combination of farce and satire. A Plays and Players critic observed that the play "is both an act of conscious homage to Feydeau and a pungent, witty, acerbic attack on the Irish nouveau riche—in particular on their exploitation of their country's political and folk heritage as a tourist attraction." The two principal characters are prosperous Irish business partners whose new venture, a motel, has recently been constructed. In an effort to attract customers, the entrepreneurs name each room after a famed Irish hero. The story begins at the celebration of the motel's opening and rapidly becomes a farcical comedy of misunderstanding and sexual innuendo involving the businessmen, their discontented wives, a rambunctious television personality, the nymphomaniac motel manager, and the night watchman. Stage's R. B. Marriott hailed Byrne's efforts, asserting that while he "creates vivid personalities among his bizarre characters, he also creates strong, smoothly progressive farcical situations with rich trimmings." Marriott continued that Byrne's "wit can be sharp, his humour splendidly" rowdy.

The author's next play received rave reviews and won several drama awards. Da is an autobiographical comedy-drama about a bereaved son, Charlie, on his return to Ireland and the scene of his boyhood. Charlie's father, Da, has recently died and the son tries to exorcise himself of the painful memory of his parent while sitting in his father's vacant cottage discarding old papers. Da returns, however, in the form of a ghost, and the father and son remember the past together. "Da is a beguiling play about a son's need to come to terms with his father—and with himself," disclosed Mel Gussow of the New York Times. "Warmly but unsentimentally, it concerns itself with paternity, adolescence, the varieties of familial love and the tricks and distortions of memory." He concluded that "Da is a humane and honest memory play in which, with great affection and humor, we are invited to share the life of a family." Similarly complimentary, John Simon of New York remarked: "A charming, mellow, saucy, and bittersweet boulevard comedy, but from a boulevard whose dreams are not entirely housebroken and have a bit of untamable Hiberian wilderness left fluttering in them." Byrne later wrote the screenplay for a film version of Da, starring Martin Sheen as Charlie.

Love in the Title, is the story of Katie, a thirty-seven-year-old Irish novelist, who, while enjoying a picnic in a meadow, is joined by her mother and grandmother in earlier stages of their lives. Cat, Katie's grandmother, is a twenty-year-old, free-spirited girl in 1932. Triona, Katie's mother, is an uptight, conservative woman from the 1960s. Together, the three women compare the Ireland of the present to the Ireland of the past. Steve Winn of the San Francisco Chronicle observed: Byrne's "fanciful meeting of mother, daughter, and granddaughter in an Irish meadow takes a beguiling look at how both past and future exert a powerful hold." In the Guardian, Mic Moroney noted that while the play is "uneven," it is "by far the most probing and perhaps honest of Leonard's plays in many years."

In addition to his plays and screenplays, Byrne has written several books. In Home before Night, Byrne rehashes some of the incidents he already covered in Da. Richard Eder stated in the New York Times Book Review: "The book's sketches, touching or comical though many of them are, lack the vitality that they had when dramatized onstage." Susan von Hoffmann of the New Republic also spotted annoying similarities between the play and book; however, she asserted that "a three-character play by nature lacks the richer texture of the memoir and these rough spots melt away in the larger view of Ireland and of a boy's slow and often painful discovery that his life is in the end a journey home." A New Yorker reviewer called Home before Night an "eloquent little book of merry and bitter reminisce," noting that Byrne "has led a life of classic Irish disarray."

Out after Dark, the sequel to Home before Night, continues Byrne's autobiographical account of his boyhood in Ireland. This second volume tells the story of his adolescence in the 1940s and 1950s and his first experiences as a writer.

A Wild People, Byrne's first novel, is the story of TJ Quill, a film critic chosen as the archivist for his favorite Western filmmaker, Sean O'Fearna. Karen Traynor wrote in the Library Journal, "The authenticity of [Byrne's] characters captures the essence of Irish culture." A reviewer in Publishers Weekly said the plot was "haphazard" at first, but it "gradually grows into a complex social comedy."

Byrne's book Dear Paule is a collection of letters that appeared in his weekly column in the London Sunday Independent. The letters, addressed to his wife, Paule, helped Byrne work through his grief over her sudden death. A compilation of memories of their life together, the column expresses how the smallest things in life remind him of her. Pauline Ferrie, a reviewer for Bookview Ireland, wrote that Byrne's letters are a "realization that he cannot fulfill his promise to remember his wife without first facing up to her absence."

Byrne once told CA:"I am not an Irish writer, but a writer who happens to be Irish. This is not hair-splitting: I find that the former is usually categorized as someone who writes quaint, charming, witty, idiomatic dialogue, but whose work has no real validity outside of Ireland. The people I write about are those in the small seaside town I was born in and in which I now live, ten miles from Dublin. I use them as a means of exploring myself, which is what I believe writing is about. I usually pick an emotional or biological crossroads: the realization of middle age (Summer), the death of a parent (Da), or the onset of death (A Life). The themes are weighty, but I treat them in terms of comedy—serious comedy, that is. I write without knowing where I am going; it is a journey for me as well as the audience, and I write about recognizable human beings. If a play of mine does not evoke recognition in Buffalo, Liverpool, Lille, or Melbourne, then it is an utter failure. I try not to repeat myself; life is too short to chew the same cabbage twice. I think that basically I am that unfashionable thing: an optimist. My work says that life may be bad, but we can change it by changing ourselves, and of course my best play is always the next one."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 19, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Volume 6, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 13: British Dramatists since World War II, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982.

Drama for Students, Volume 13, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 2: Playwrights, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1993.

King, Kimball, Ten Modern Irish Playwrights, Garland (New York, NY), 1979.

New York Theatre Annual, Volume 2, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1978.

PERIODICALS

Back Stage, July 27, 2001, Irene Backalenick, theater review of A Life, p. 44.

Back Stage West, March 23, 2000, Judy Richter, theater review of Love in the Title, p. 19.

Booklist, June 1, 2002, Patricia Monaghan, review of A Wild People, p. 1686.

Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, July 1989, Thomas B. O'Grady, "Insubstantial Fathers and Consubstantial Sons: A Note on Patrimony and Patricide in Friel and Leonard," pp. 71-79.

Guardian, Mic Moroney, theatre review of Love in the Title, p. 8.

Irish Literary Supplement, spring, 1990, S. F. Gallagher, "Q. and A. with Hugh Leonard," pp. 13-14.

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2002, review of A Wild People, p. 689.

Library Journal, July 2002, Karen Traynor, review of A Wild People, p. 120; April 1, 2003, Ming-ming Shen Kuo, review of Leonard, Hugh and Others, New Plays from the Abbey Theatre, 1999-2001, p. 98.

New Republic, June 7, 1980, p. 39; May 16, 1988, Stanley Kauffmann, movie review of Da, p. 20; June 20, 1994, Stanley Kauffmann, movie review of Widows' Peak, p. 26.

New York, April 10, 1978.

New Yorker, July 28, 1980, p. 102.

New York Times, March 14, 1978; May 2, 1978; May 14, 1978; November 10, 1978; March 25, 1979; April 23, 1980.

New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1980, p. 11.

Observer Review, June 20, 1971.

Plays and Players, August, 1971.

Publishers Weekly, March 15, 1991, Sybil Steinberg, review of Parnell and the Englishwoman, p. 45; June 21, 1991, review of Out after Dark, p. 47; June 17, 2002, review of A Wild People, p. 43.

Punch, April 30, 1969.

San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2000, Steven Winn, "Love, Family and Time in an Irish Meadow," p. B1.

Stage, June 10, 1971; June 24, 1971.

Sunday Times (London, England), March 14, 1999, Gerry McCarthy, "Hugh Scores with His Three Ladies," p. 2.

Times (London, England), March 12, 1999, Luke Clancy, "Time Travelers," p. 35.

Variety, April 30, 1969.

Washington Post, June 6, 1978.