Hugh Leonard's recollections of his Dublin childhood [in "Home Before Night"] are a charming and gritty advertisement for the past, without being quite the real thing….

Mr. Leonard is a playwright, and an appealing one. In the kind of fairly traditional theater he practices, the writer speaks indirectly, through his characters. The "I" in "Home Before Night" is, in theory, the author, but we do not feel that he is speaking directly to us. He could be a stage figure: a character created at a distance to relay what the author has to say. At times, in fact, Mr. Leonard writes of himself in the third person. Possibly the intention is to change perspective; in fact, it increases the distance.

It is as a dramatist that Mr. Leonard has done the spiritual work that makes a genuine memoir. "Da" presented a number of strongly delineated figures from the author's past…. These were not passive sketches; onstage, the author-protagonist is forced to confront them and himself in them.

Perhaps it is not an operation you can do twice. "Home Before Night" compiles the material from which some of the incidents in "Da" were drawn….

The book contains many other scenes and personages left out of the play….

The writing is usually apt and often delightful. Mr. Leonard is an expert at Irish verbal gigantism…. (p. 11)

On the other hand the gigantism can shade into easy indulgence. There is a bit too much obvious Irishry in the author's own language—he will use a "your man" or "your woman, Norma Shearer" in a way that suggests local color being evoked with excessive deliberation.

The book's sketches, touching or comical though many of them are, lack the vitality that they had when dramatized onstage. Mr. Leonard seems to stand apart from them, decorating and adjusting them. They are a record rather than a search; an evocation with a sense of fatigue to it. It is pleasant but bland. A memoir's true force comes when the writer is on a pilgrimage into his past, to learn or be purified. Mr. Leonard is on a kind of tourist trip here. (p. 22)