The Au Pair Man | Political and Social Implications in Leonard’s Plays
In the following excerpt, Gallagher discusses the “lightness” of Leonard’s plays, the political and social implications, and Leonard’s conscious effort not to be an “Irish writer.” Leonard states that The Au Pair Man is about an outsider who, though he detests the English class structure, uses it for his own material gain.
Christopher Fitz-Simon has described Hugh Leonard as ‘the most prolific and the most technically assured of modern Irish playwrights’ (The Irish Theatre, 1983, p. 191). He may also be the least pretentious. During the 1985 rehearsals of The Mask of Moriarty, based on characters culled from stories by A. Conan Doyle, Leonard, asked by a journalist why he had not written ‘a Festival play that Says Something’, replied:
I am saying something, if with a small ‘s’, and it is this. If you care to come in out of the rain for a couple of hours, I...
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