The manner in which layers and layers of motivation are peeled away [in A Walk on the Water] is deft, and so is the technique of sliding from a dialogue between Owen and Alma in 1956 to a dramatization of Owen's memory of 1945. Each of the seven roles gives an actor more than a stereotype to grapple with, but there is about the play the air of a technical exercise.

Stephen D, however, is one of the most impressive plays to appear in Dublin since the war….

From the Catholic point of view, there is some justice to the charge that the play is blasphemous and immoral, for the theme of Joyce's novels [Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero] and of Leonard's play is the revolt of the artist—a revolt which in Irish terms means a repudiation of what Leonard calls "the four great 'F's' of Ireland: faith, fatherland, family and friendship." The "F" most stressed in the play is faith, and this most exacerbates the feelings of devout Catholics. (p. 187)

The compression of the novels' details and the heightening of their dramatic effect is firm evidence of Leonard's craftsmanship. He presents salient dramatic scenes bearing on the theme and all linked by the narrator Stephen, who remembers them as he leaves Ireland for exile. The play would require imagination and skill from a director, for Leonard incorporates no stage directions in the text. The modern stage has been long aware, however, that it possesses a fluidity nearly as great as the film's…. In Stephen D, Leonard handles this free realism consummately.

The Poker Session is an original play about a man of good will, Billy Beavis, who has just returned home from a year in a lunatic asylum. He has been victimized by his family and friends, and, as the play unravels, it becomes increasingly clear that they were more responsible for his breakdown than he was. The play is a kind of detective story set on the night that Billy returns, and it slowly answers the three questions of, in Leonard's words, "Is Billy now sane? Why has Des, the missing guest, failed to show up? Who drove Billy into the asylum?"

There is a growing sympathy with Billy until we learn that what caused his insanity was not the treachery of his family or his girl, but that his friend Des had bluffed him in a poker game. This discovery answers the question of Billy's present sanity even more clearly than the revelation that he has murdered Des and is going to fix the blame on Teddy, a middle-aged hipster friend from the asylum. The pertinent point of the play is, then, that "It's the innocent who get punished … we all have it done to us, and we do it to other people."

This point is not sufficiently stressed at the end, for the gimmicky twists of the plot command too much attention. Indeed, because of the plot, the play at the end is reduced in stature from what should have been a serious work to what is little more than a crafty melodrama. Through much of the piece, Leonard seemed to aim higher.

Leonard is a thorough professional of much experience. This fact gives his work a slickness and command of technique greater than many of his Irish contemporaries, but it also implies a danger of falling into a pat commercialism. A psychological thriller like The Poker Session is good, taut theatre …, but so far Leonard's best work has been in adaptation. He is a writer in his prime, however, and with the technical weapons at his command he could go on to a series of equally deft but more penetrating original plays which would make these early ones look like exercises.

Certainly a long step in that direction is Mick and Mick (or, to give it its new title, All the Nice People)…. Almost totally absent is the pat gimmickry of the earlier original work. This play is a rasping and yet partly loving indictment of middle-class Dublin seen through the eyes of a girl who has returned from working in England. If the play has a fault, it is that Leonard more persuasively documents the reasons for detesting the middle-class than the reasons for loving it. That fact may make the play rather more coldly caustic than is comfortable, but the quality of the indictment is first-rate. (pp. 188-89)