Da by Hugh Leonard

First published: 1973, in Plays and Players

First produced: 1973, at the Olney Theater, Olney, Maryland

Type of plot: Comedy; memory play

Time of work: May, 1968

Locale: South Dublin

Principal Characters:

• Charlie, a playwright
• Nicholas Tynan (Da), his adoptive father
• Margaret Tynan, Da’s wife
• Mr. Drumm, Charlie’s employer

The Play

Da begins with the narrator of the play, Charlie, a man in his forties, sitting alone at a kitchen table looking through a pile of family papers. After a moment Oliver, a boyhood friend, enters offering condolences. The man Charlie called “Da” (the word is an Irish diminutive for father) has died, and it is the day of his funeral. Charlie has returned to this, his boyhood home, after the burial, to settle whatever business remains as quickly as possible.

Oliver has not changed much since the days when he and Charlie were friends; in middle age he still acts like an adolescent, which underscores a basic fact about Charlie. He has changed. Now a playwright living in London, he has grown up and bettered himself. To judge by the outward show, he has risen above his origins, and this play catches him on the one day when he is forced to revisit his former life.

Oliver soon leaves, and Charlie is alone in the house, sorting papers and letting his mind wander, until another visitor comes shortly before the end of the play. After this second brief visit, Charlie has finished his business and leaves for London. This is all the play has in the way of real-time plot. Da is a memory play, and the bulk of it is made up of Charlie’s rather noisy reminiscences, as the creatures of Charlie’s memory come onto the stage to play their parts. Da’s ghost, entering the kitchen and blithely discussing the weather at his funeral, is the first of these memory characters to appear. Others follow as they come into Charlie’s memory. One is the memory of Charlie’s younger self, with whom the mature Charlie has a number of comic arguments. The action of the play follows no order but the order of recollection. Each of the two acts is played without interruption, arranged roughly into scenes as Charlie’s mind casts back on the events, significant and insignificant, of his early life.

In this way the basic facts about the family that lived in this house are revealed. Da was a simple and a humble man who worked for fifty-eight years as a gardener for low wages. He took a wife, when very young, in a marriage arranged by himself and his bride’s father. His wife, a stronger-willed person than he, was in love with another man. She acquiesced in the arrangement out of a sense of duty, because of her youth, and because of the hardness of the times. Unable to have children of their own, the couple adopted Charlie, who grew up a bright child and won scholarships in school. When he came of age, he also took menial work, spending fourteen years as a clerk, before escaping to his new life in London. In this incompletely joined family, the tensions and resentments were never resolved or put aside.

Da’s ghost appears, summoned up to contradict Charlie when he tells a routine white lie, even before Oliver leaves. Da is a character full of Irish color. His speech is thick with Irishisms such as “donkey’s years” and “hoot-shaggin’.” He is easygoing, simple in his tastes, regular in his habits, thrifty, stubborn in his opinions, giving of himself, and proud about taking gifts from others. He is, in short, a laborer of a type that was common in the United Kingdom before World War II, a working-class man and urban peasant.

From the first, Charlie makes it clear that he is not completely happy with his father’s memory. In a passage describing Da’s regular habits and simple tastes, Charlie says to Da, “I never knew you to have a hope or a dream or say a half-wise thing.” Da’s colloquial speech, much of it quite new to American ears, still sounds well-worn. He speaks entirely in bromides and catchphrases. In one moment of high exasperation, Charlie calls Da “an old thick, a zombie, a mastodon.” Seen through Charlie’s eyes, the virtues listed above seem to be faults: Da’s thrift becomes stinginess; stubbornness in opinion, obstinacy; simplicity and regularity, mere dullness; and contentment with station, servility.

In the play’s first full-scale flashback, Mr. Drumm comes to the house to interview Charlie for a job under him in the Irish Civil Service. Mr. Drumm is, as nearly as possible, Da’s opposite in everything. He is cynical and hard-hearted. He is as superior in his manner as Da is humble, as contemptuous as Da is accepting. Mr. Drumm says of Da that “there are milions like him: inoffensive, stupid, and not a damn bit of good.” He says of Da’s simple charm, “Yes, the dangerous ones are those who amuse us.”

While the interview with Mr. Drumm is occurring, Charlie argues with his younger self about young Charlie’s disloyalty to Da. The mature Charlie respects Mr. Drumm less. For young Charlie he had been something of a mentor. “He taught me,” says Charlie, “not by his enthusiasms—he had none—but by his dislikes.” When Mr. Drumm is being his most savage about Da, the audience sees Da, on another part of the stage, asking for work on Sundays so that he can afford to buy Charlie new clothes for his new job.

From here the play continues, in its haphazard way, through the events of the past. Most of the scenes touch in some way on the tensions that surround Charlie’s adoption or the arranged marriage. One scene, in which Da receives a pitifully small pension after fifty-four years of work for the same family, makes explicit the theme of class difference, which, it seems, is never absent from Irish literature. Well into the second act Charlie begins to remember things that are from the very recent past. He remembers Da’s senile last years, when Da was alone after his wife’s death. Charlie feels some guilt that, although he offered to take Da with him to live in London, he did not insist strongly enough that he do so. Had he insisted, Charlie believes, he might have started to repay the enormous debt that he owed to his father. Da eventually dies alone in a nursing home.

Shortly before the end of the second act, Mr. Drumm comes to visit, in his capacity as executor of Da’s estate. Mr. Drumm is now a sick old man, drained from living with his own bitterness. Charlie and Mr. Drumm discuss the choice Mr. Drumm has made in his life—to hold to his standards—and where this has led him. Speaking of his own health and Da’s death, Mr. Drumm says, “in the end we fetch up against the self-same door. I find that aggravating.”

Mr. Drumm leaves the two items of Da’s estate which were willed to Charlie. One is a worthless heirloom which Da had received as part of his pension. The other is a sum of cash. Charlie is at first surprised that Da should have had money to leave. He had only his own minuscule pension and whatever money Charlie had sent him. Quickly he understands: The legacy is the money that Charlie sent him, which Da has saved for this purpose. From the grave, Da denies Charlie any satisfaction in paying his debts.

His business finished, Charlie prepares to leave. In a moment of comic resoluteness, Charlie tells Da that he is reneging on all his debts, destroying everything that might remind him of Da, and leaving him behind. He locks Da inside the house and throws away the key. This, naturally, has no effect on Da. Saying “Sure you can’t get rid of a bad thing,” he follows Charlie to London, where he will remain, part of the memory that Charlie will never be able to forget.

Dramatic Devices

Da reveals the mind of its protagonist to the audience. Both the organization of the stage and the devices of the storytelling serve this end. The first requirement of the stage is that it be flexible, to follow the play’s fluid narrative. The set is constructed around the kitchen and living room of the Tynan family home. This room was obviously the center of family life, and the stage directions call it “the womb of the play.” The area taken up by the kitchen remains the kitchen throughout the play, and it is the most realistically depicted part of the stage. The space surrounding the kitchen is divided into a number of less defined and more flexible areas. On one side is a neutral area, defined by lighting, which serves as a number of locales that the script requires. Behind and to the other side of the kitchen are areas that serve as a hill in a park and as the seashore.

Only in this way can the stage hold this nonlinear play. The action can skip seamlessly from location to location; the story can jump effortlessly forward and back. At times discrete events happen simultaneously, kept apart by the boundaries on the stage, and at other times characters speak to one another across the boundaries. Charlie can sit at his homely kitchen table while his memory swirls and darts around him, following its own lead. It is here that Da uses the best possibilities of the stage, beautifully showing the mysterious workings of memory.

Otherworldly figures are quite common on the modern stage. Ghosts have a long history as theatrical devices, but the modern stage has seen many more kinds of unreal figures. A number of plays have used second actors (or other devices) to show the private selves of the public personae onstage or the fantasy selves of the “real” characters. However, Hugh Leonard’s characters in Da are a category unto themselves. Da seems to be a ghost, but not all the figures can be ghosts. Mr. Drumm, for example, if not healthy, is still quite alive. It seems rather that the younger Drumm comes from Charlie’s memory, where he lives because Charlie has never outgrown the deep effect Mr. Drumm had on him in his youth. These figures might, then, be memories, but they seem too lively for that. They stand out because of their independence. They bicker with Charlie, and contradict and disobey him; even Charlie’s younger self asserts his independence. In a way they are memories, but the memories of a man with a productive imagination.

Charlie Tynan is a playwright, and it must be assumed that his imagination, stimulated to recollection, would yield scenes of these people and places that he knows so well. With his playwright’s imagination, Charlie can count on the company of these people for the rest of his life. They are like Da, who pops up when Charlie has forgotten his beginnings and is trying to lose himself in London sophistication—Da, who cannot be driven off, who follows Charlie back to his other life. They are like the creatures who live in all persons’ memories, cantankerous, independent, not to be disposed of lightly. In creating these new figures for his play, Leonard has again used the possibilities of the stage to give his audience an insight into the mind of his protagonist.

Critical Context

Da marked something of a turning point in the career of Hugh Leonard. Until Da, none of his work had a truly personal stamp. Adaptation had been a staple of his work, and his first critical success, Stephen D, was an adaptation that contained hardly a word of his own. Most of his original plays before the time of Da had been skillfully constructed, highly contrived works, full of the mechanics of the theater. The Poker Session (pr., pb. 1963), for example, is a play about the psychological undressing of a family over a game of cards, which derives its force from being part detective play, part thriller, and part black farce. The Au Pair Man (pr., pb. 1968) is a play about a British dowager and the uneducated young Irishman she hires as her au pair man—an allegory of the relations between the protagonists’ two nations. The Patrick Pearse Motel (pr., pb. 1971) is an energetic bedroom farce, a satire of the materialism of modern Ireland and its hypocritical veneration of its patriots and martyrs.

In short, Leonard’s early work was marked by the themes one finds in Da—the abrasiveness of family life, and the chafing between the old and new Ireland. The themes were present, but the personality of the artist was not. Even a slight familiarity with the life of Leonard shows that Da is an autobiographical play. The adoption, the gardener foster-father, the years spent with the Irish Civil Service are all true of Leonard as well as Charlie Tynan. It has been reported that Leonard nearly abandoned this play soon after he had started to write it, when he realized that he would have to include himself in it. The theatergoing public has been grateful that, in the end, he did not. Da remains one of the most personal products of the modern stage. One need not know that the play is autobiographical to enjoy it, but this fact has in all probability contributed to the play’s great popularity. American taste, in particular, appreciates stories about artists and rewards artists for opening themselves up to their audiences.

Da was well loved in a string of productions in the United States and the United Kingdom. It premiered in Olney, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., and was later a success at the Dublin Theater Festival. It also had successful runs in Chicago, London, and New York City. Critics praised it almost unanimously for its combination of human warmth and clear vision. It received many awards, including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for best play of the 1977-1978 season. A film version of the play, starring Barnard Hughes as Da and Martin Sheen as Charlie, was produced by Filmdallas studios and released in 1988.

Sources for Further Study

Gallagher, S. F. “Q. and A. with Hugh Leonard.” Irish Literary Supplement: A Review of Irish Books (Spring, 1990): 13-14.

King, Kimball. Ten Modern Irish Playwrights. New York: Garland, 1979.

Leonard, Hugh. Home Before Night. New York: Atheneum, 1980.

The New Republic. Review of Da. 178 (May 27, 1978): 22-23.

The New Yorker. Review of Da. 104 (March 27, 1978): 96.

O’Grady, Thomas B. “Insubstantial Fathers and Consubstantial Sons: A Note on Patrimony and Patricide in Friel and Leonard.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (July, 1989): 71-79.

Time. Review of Da. 111 (March 27, 1978): 96.