Let a sentimental or cliched question be asked ('Where has the time gone?') and Drumm is ready with the sardonic response ('Most of it has gone to listening to banalities…').

Her insight is so clear that even Desmond must accept the reason of her choice through his hurt.ĭrumm marries Dorothy, a more accommodating type, who is able to see through Desmond’s thorny exterior and admires and loves him for the virtues that shine behind his coruscating words.

In one of the particularly fine speeches of the play, the young Mary, played here with both passion and humor by Fiona Glascott, explains to Desmond why she chose Lar over him. He calls Lar, a friend through all those years, 'a man of no malice and less merit.' In their youth, they both wooed Mary Lar won her hand. Tirades of condescension flow from him like venom. The action shifts smoothly back and forth between the periods, allowing memory and reality to cross-check, allowing the past and the present to illuminate each other.ĭrumm is an intelligent and scathingly witty man, whose sees his unedited comments about others as honesty and truth, while failing to see the truth of the pain he thus insensitively inflicts.

There is a cast of eight playing four characters, four in their youth, four now at maturity. The central character, Desmond Drumm, a civil servant nearing retirement in 1977, thinks back to a time forty years earlier, as he seeks to mend some frazzled relationships and sort out his past. But Leonard’s canny observation carries A Life beyond regional interest this is work of universal insight into human weaknesses and strengths, and the knotty crisscrosses of personality and relationships. It surely belongs to the great Irish tradition of storytelling and conveys a palpable sense of place in the glimpses of small town life, the mores of the times, as well as the day-to-day detail-you can almost taste the stout the men drink in the second act. The Abbey Theater has revived it this summer in a delightful production that gives a new generation of theatre-goers the opportunity to savor its humor, wisdom, and humanity-sharply and deeply felt.Ī Life draws on autobiographical materials that Leonard tapped both in his memoir, Home Before Night, and in the later play, Da. A Life was first produced by the Abbey Theatre in 1979 and has had successful runs in cities around the world. Hugh Leonard is a prolific writer with thirty-two stage plays to his credit.

Home before night by hugh leonard