WITH SUNSHINE streaming into the Church of the Assumption in Dalkey and a sprightly fugue issuing from the organ, it was clear from the moment the curtain went up on the funeral Mass of John Keyes Byrne – known to his friends as “Jack” and to the rest of the world as the playwright Hugh Leonard – that it was going to be as much a celebration of an extraordinarily productive creative life as an occasion of sorrow and farewell.
The service, led at Leonard’s request by Monsignor Patrick Finn from St Mary’s Church in Haddington Road, was certainly not lacking in theatricality.
The playwright Bernard Farrell read from the Book of Wisdom to a congregation sprinkled with the white heads of Leonard’s neighbours and contemporaries from Dalkey village, where he had lived for most of his 82 years, and with the familiar faces of several generations of the best-known actors, directors and writers from Irish film, theatre and television.
Among the latter were the director of the Abbey Theatre, Fiach Mac Conghail, the Gate Theatre’s director Michael Colgan, the playwright Frank McGuinness, the actor Barry McGovern and the former director of the Dublin Theatre Festival Tony Ó Dálaigh.
The chief mourner at the funeral was the playwright’s daughter, Danielle. Monsignor Finn offered his deepest sympathy to her and to Leonard’s second wife Kathy. He thanked the friends “who kept a long vigil at his bedside” during his final illness.
The actor David Kelly – who created the role of Rashers Tierney in one of Leonard’s best-loved television adaptations, James Plunkett’s Strumpet City – was also present. President Mary McAleese was represented by her aide-de-camp, Capt Murt Larkin, while politicians who attended included Minister of State with responsibility for the arts, Dr Martin Mansergh, and Labour leader and local TD Eamon Gilmore.
Monsignor Finn paid tribute to the “acerbic, waspish wit” of Leonard’s regular newspaper column The Curmudgeon, and described him as “a decent, intelligent, sensitive man who spoke with refreshing frankness”.
When the priest recalled how “the one thing Jack desired again and again was to be reconciled with those friends with whom he’d fallen out”, and invited anyone present who fell into that category to say some silent words of reconciliation, you could have heard a pin drop.
In a eulogy the former director of the Abbey Theatre, Patrick Mason, said that attending a performance of The Plough and the Stars in the autumn of 1950 had “lit a fire of creative energy” in Leonard which was “to burn for another 60 years”.
He was “one of the most politically engaged writers of his generation” and one of our most astute social commentators, possessed of “a crusading zeal to expose hypocrisy, bigotry and moral chicanery”.
“The medium through which he chose to do this was laughter – animated, healing, humanising laughter,” Mr Mason said. “In a bewildering number of essays, plays and columns he poured out a torrent of wit: a Herculean labour to cheer us into a more benevolent mood.”
His tribute received a warm and generous round of applause.
As the congregation filed out into the sunshine and the coffin began its final journey to Mount Jerome crematorium, the uniformed staff from the Dalkey Castle and Heritage Centre across the road – whose “writer’s gallery” features a panel devoted to Leonard – lined up to pay their respects; a graceful, timeless gesture which would surely bring a smile to the face of even the most determined curmudgeon.
