As an adult, Charlie is a successful writer and lives in London with his wife and children. Charlie also feels disdainful of Da’s subservience toward his employers and Da’s hostile temper toward his wife. Although as a child, Charlie is fond of Da, by the time he is a teenager, he feels ashamed of his father’s ignorance and crude language. Through a series of memory scenes, Charlie recalls key incidents in his relationship with his adoptive father throughout his life. As Charlie sits in the kitchen of his childhood home, sorting through his father’s things, he is visited by the ghost of Da. In 1978, Leonard received several awards for Da, including the Antoinette Perry (“Tony”) Award for best play, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play, the Drama Desk Award for outstanding new play, and the Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding play.ĭa begins in May 1968, just after Da’s funeral. Da was first performed at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1973. A film version of 'Da' starring Martin Sheen appeared in 1988.Da is a semi-autobiographical, two-act play by Hugh Leonard that explores the relationship of Charlie, a successful writer, with his adoptive father, whom he calls Da (as in “Dad”).

Together they reflect on the key moments of compassion and disconnection in their parting lives. 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.

Home before night by hugh leonard