![]() ![]() A film version of "Da" starring Martin Sheen appeared in 1988. ![]() Together they reflect on the key moments of compassion and disconnection in their parting lives. Home Before Night covers Jack Keyes Byrne (Hugh Leonard)s early life and adulthood to the point when he makes the decision to leave a steady job in the civil. The play, drawing on his own upbringing by adoptive parents, explores a writer returning home to Ireland upon his adoptive father's death - and finding himself caught in bittersweet dialogue with his ghost, who refuses to leave him. Leonard's talents reached an international stage when his play "Da" made a triumphant two-year run on Broadway in 1977-78. He wrote 16 plays specifically for the Dublin Theatre Festival, starting with "A Walk on the Water" in 1960, and served as the festival's program director from 1978 to 1980. ![]() In the 1960s, Leonard became Ireland's most accomplished adapter of classic works and short stories to the Irish stage and screen, and a driving force in the promotion of modern Irish stagecraft. ![]() He quit his day job in 1957 after the Abbey Theatre triumph of his first play, "The Birthday Party," the year before. He was born John Keyes Byrne, but took on the pen name Hugh Leonard in the arch-conservative Catholic Ireland of the 1950s to hide from his Irish civil service employers his double-life as an aspiring, outspoken writer. ![]()
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