Jack Keyes T/A Hugh Leonard

Hugh Leonard

Jack Keyes trading as Hugh Leonard was the title on the VAT file which crossed my desk many years ago when I was an Irish Civil servant. For Ireland’s foremost playwright used the nom de plume of Hugh Leonard originally to hide his writing from his Civil Service bosses but he was born John Keyes Byrne on November 9, 1926. He died in Dublin recently on February 12, 2009, aged 82. The accountant’s firm handling his VAT affairs was Russell Murphy & Co. who had many high profile artists and writers on their books. They were (and still are) covered by a “creative writing “exemption in the Irish Income Tax code which meant their royalties from creative writing were tax free. Russell Murphy wrongly advised his clients who benefited from this generous exemption that they were also exempt from VAT and such were his high level connections that the Irish Tax Authorities disgracefully on “a concessional basis” wrote off over four years VAT just from his clients.

For Russell Murphy was well connected being a Governor of the Bank of Ireland and on the Council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He was a patron of the arts and his artistic clients revelled in his eccentricity including wearing a cloak with a red silk lining and on occasion being greeted by the sight of him hiding under his desk when they went into his office. The full extent of his eccentricity was exposed when he committed suicide a couple of years later in 1986 and it was found many of these high profile clients had invested money with him which had disappeared, Hugh Leonard lost over a million pounds and the broadcaster Gay Byrne a similar amount. They both took a High Court case against the Irish Institute of Chartered Accountants but, such is the quality of professional supervision in Ireland, they never received any compensation. This is the same Institute which didn’t feel the need to expel another high profile member, former Prime Minister and Chartered Accountant, Charles Haughey, even though he hadn’t paid a subscription for 22 years and had financed his millionaire lifestyle with over £8.5 million pounds of undeclared backhanders on which he hadn’t paid tax.

Hugh Leonard rose from humble beginnings as an adopted child to become one of Ireland’s foremost dramatists, a writer who discovered his talent for biting wit during the drudgery of clerking for the Land Commission, and, helped by television and film earnings, graduated from an Aston Martin to a Rolls-Royce and a boat on the Shannon.




Da

His most successful play, which earned him a reputed £500,000, was the autobiographical Da, a triumph in Dublin and New York, and later made into a film. But — and this was to be a constant theme in Leonard’s career — it made little impact in London. He pretended indifference to being snubbed by Shaftesbury Avenue, resigning himself to the British perception of Irish plays: “Our image is trouble, and who wants to pay good money for that?” His first West End venture, Stephen D, an adaptation of James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist, had a success he was never to repeat. This brilliantly stage worthy rendering told how Joyce escaped from the ties of religion and country to call his soul his own, hammering out in words of iron his sense of identity and direction. Leonard was to achieve a similar escape.

The West End debut of his farce The Patrick Pearse Motel in 1971 nailed his strengths and weaknesses. He peopled his Feydeau-like rendezvous not with the cut-out dudes, oafs and termagants of farce, but with sharply observed contemporaries, such as the couple who patched up a cracking marriage by loading their house with costly gadgets. But in interrupting the rat-tat-tat of disaster upon disaster in order to develop character, he forgot the farceur’s obligation to be a sharpshooter. So in London the play failed, whereas in Dublin it had delighted a less impatient audience.

Born John Keyes Byrne in Dublin in 1926, and always known as Jack, he was brought up by foster-parents in a tense, bullying, guilt-ridden household where he learnt that “love upside-down is love for all that.” In his book, Home Before Dark, he described growing up in the Dublin of the 1930s as the adopted son of the gentle day-labourer Da portrayed in his play, a sweet old nobody exasperatingly contented with his lot who fought a fiercely proud wife with enough foolish stratagems to drive a saint to drink.



By way of scholarship and a religious schooling at Presentation College, Dun Laoghaire, Leonard wheedled himself into the Irish civil service, having meanwhile indulged his love of cinema by appearing as an extra in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, which was filmed in Ireland. During his stint as a civil servant he began writing plays for amateurs and in 1956 The Big Birthday was his first work to be staged at the Abbey Theatre.

Further plays and a version of The Archers for commercial radio (geared to advertise Cadbury’s) enabled him to leave the civil service and become a full-time writer. In 1961 he joined Granada Television in Manchester as a script editor but he preferred writing for himself and soon moved to London as a freelance. He lived in England for some years until tax concessions drew him back to Ireland and his roots.
His expertise as an adaptor, confirmed by Stephen D, also served him well in television for which he produced skilful versions of Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, The Moonstone and Wuthering Heights as well as tackling Irish subjects in James Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1980) and The Irish RM (1983) from the stories of Somerville and Ross.


Home before Night

He also adapted Chesterton’s Father Brown stories and Norman Collins’s London Belongs to Me, wrote comedy material for Ronnie Barker and created a deliciously quirky situation comedy, Me Mammy (1968-71), which starred Milo O’Shea as an Irishman in London, successful in business but still a bachelor and under the thumb of his fiercely traditional Roman Catholic mother. For the cinema he adapted Shaw’s Great Catherine (1968), with Jeanne Moreau and Peter O’Toole and his own Da (1988).
But despite this prolific output for the small and big sceen he never abandoned the theatre and during 1976-77 he served as the Abbey’s literary manager. Notable Dublin productions included the comedies Summer and Time Was and in 1978 Da went to Broadway, where it won a Tony award. Two other plays, The Au Pair Man and A Life were nominated for Tonys and it was with the latter that Leonard wrote his masterpiece. The ingeniously structured play switched back and forth in time to show four young hopefuls in their 20s and the life-worn but mettlesome folk they matured into.

The comic hassles and bitter misunderstandings between the tough older folk were seen as the outcome of the foolish passions of themselves when young. The play also contrasted the stiff pedant the giddy girl had rejected — at whose funeral, he admits, “the only mourners will be a group of unsplit infinitives” — and the warm-hearted chump she preferred, a lusty incorrigible who sees the world through a Guinness darkly but sees it whole.

He was a notable dramatist and a very successful television scriptwriter, but he always saw himself as an outsider among his peers and was quick to take offence at perceived slights from critics or fellow playwrights. Indeed, in his long-running 'Sunday Independent' column (and before that in 'Hibernia' magazine), he was adept both at settling old scores and in making new enemies.

"A literary movement in Ireland," he once quipped, "is two writers on speaking terms with each other." He chuckled as he said it, though he was keenly aware of the personal truth behind the jibe, given that he always felt distant from, and wary of, most of his writing contemporaries. Indeed, although his plays brought him considerable popular and commercial success, he was never granted the esteem that was routinely enjoyed by Brian Friel and Tom Murphy.


Dalkey Main Street

In his later years Leonard lived contentedly in Dalkey, continued to write plays for the Dublin Festival, hob-nobbing at night over a jar with folk he had known all his life. The hack work behind him, his writing became informed with a canny awareness of the sad complexities of life and the warmth that came from his ability to enjoy people of every kind for what they were. With his quick dry wit he contributed a weekly satirical column to the Sunday Independent and had his own regular Saturday morning radio show.

The violence, the fecklessness, the charm and that peculiar Irish blend of arrogance and sweetness in his countrymen were studied by Leonard with a humanity which ranks his later work with the best of his time. Mischievously, Leonard would sometimes exploit the naivety and ignorance of his people, spinning tall yarns and building up mad aunts and fiery schoolmasters and priests into entertaining but incredible grotesques. But his best work is alive with delectable Dublin characters as well as domestic horrors. He took delight in debunking the mealy-mouthed primness and excessive religiosity of a country quick to put respectability before humanity. Paule Jacquet, his wife of 45 years, died in 2000. He is survived by Kathy Hayes, his second wife, and by his daughter from his first marriage.

I will remember Jack Keyes t/a Hugh Leonard above all not for the quality of his vitriol but for his honesty and integrity. That is not to discount the quality of his vitriol for as Brian Behan once remarked “he was a man without enemies, it is his friends who hate him!” Brian had been upset by Leonard describing his brother, the playwright Brendan Behan, as a second rate talent rescued by Joan Littlewood’s editing. But in an Ireland where there was tacit support for violent republicanism only Conor Cruise O’Brien and Hugh Leonard consistently spoke out against the crypto-fascism of the Provos when such sentiments were far from mainstream. Indeed Hugh Leonard’s vitriol against Charles Haughey was a persistent theme of his Sunday Independent column and for his New Year Awards each year Haughey invariably was awarded the “Gobshite of the Year” award. The only exception was the year Haughey nearly drowned when his trawler Yacht went aground on the south coast of Ireland. That year Haughey was awarded the “Sailor of the Year” award and the “Gobshite of the Year” went to God for not taking his chance when he had it! An honest voice who no doubt at this very moment is causing an argument in heaven.


Dalkey