Old Father, Old Artificer

Hugh Leonards play, Da, currently running at the Abbey, opens with an episode which is conducted without words. The central character, Charlie, is burning his father's papers and other rubbish in the cottage in Dalkey, having just come back from the funeral. He botches the job, through indecision, interruption, uncertainty; and out of that emerges the play. But just for those opening moments we witness, in dumb show, one of the cruellest and most painful occasions in life, the reading and the shredding of the evidence in a case that has finally been closed.
It is a case involving the crime of failure, and the detection of the reasons why. It is a case in which criminal and victim are interchangeable, depending on how one reads the clues. It is a case in which emotions like hate and love can be present. It is a case on the grand scale, where lesser emotions are ruled out by virtue of the fact that the combat is one locked between father and son.

Like Hugh Leonard, my father was a gardener. Like him, my father died when I was not with him. Like Leonard, the ghost-like form of my father lay across me, haunted me, until I was forced to put him into print, and attempt to exorcise him.

It did not work. He is still there.

All the rest have vanished. The places, the other people, the remembered events, the nostalgic evoking of the past, all gone. But he is still there. And with Leonard it is the same: Da is still there.

That is the beginning of the story, only. Those damned papers! Everybody who dies leaves papers. My father's "papers", as I euphemistically describe them, were the evidence, mainly of a life gone wrong. Letters that told of
relationships which had failed, diaries which contained the agonising vacuums of loneliness or of self-doubt, lists of bets placed on horses and the money won, the tinsel and wrapping paper of far-distant gifts. I sorted his papers, and tried to understand his life. I did not wish to reconstruct it, only to come to terms with it, so that we might be at peace with one another. But it did not work. Vital clues were missing, perhaps never to be discovered. And not being able to come to terms with his life, how could I ever write an end to it?

In Hugh Leonards case, there is an added dimension to those opening moments: the father whose spirit he seeks to still, whose ghost 'he wants to lay, is his adoptive father only. What might have been a straightforward piece of detective work, in which blood samples, habit, appearance, colour of eyes, relations, and certain basic documents like birth certificates, are set aside in favour of a plot that would have attracted a Wilkie Collins. Instead of the iron bracket forged out of blood, we are dealing with stretched threads the ends of which vanish in past time. The magnifying glass, and all the other accoutrements of pursuit, are thrown away in favour of pure guesswork and speculation.

My heart went out to him. Leonard was working outside the rules. He was inventing in a dimension which, by comparison with my own, was intolerable. And if mine had been difficult, what then of his?

At the level of theatre, of course, it is robust, earthy stuff. Gardeners can be passionate men, wild men, fullblooded men. They are inescapably more rounded and more real than writers. And Leonard is honest about this uneven division of appeal between himself and the Da, putting the old artificer through his paces, to the noisy delight of another generation of 'Da'-enthusiasts at the Abbey Theatre. But as a father-obsessed son, sitting in the audience, I could not escape the strange thought that the laughter had nothing to do with the case. Those who were laughing were identifying with a common denominator, or reflecting their own domestic roots, or a bit of both, with greater emphasis on the latter of the two. And if this is the stuff of success, then so be it, and good luck to the man himself.

But the case lies elsewhere. There is a moment in 'Da' when the cruelty and neglect, by the son, of his father, becomes dominant. The money sent back to Dalkey from London, the invitations to visit, the expressions of affection, hang smokey and stale in the emotionless atmosphere. And it is the nobility of the father, whose "words had forked no lightning", which transcends completely the fame and success of the son. And, oh, the pity of it!

There is a brutality there. And I am familiar with that brutality. There is a feeding by the son off the substance of his father, and I am familiar with that as well. It is not nice. But it is real.

Writing is about what is real, rather than what is nice. And nothing in all the world is more real to us than our fathers and sons, our mothers and daughters. So real, indeed, that some would say they are not the stuff of which story books and plays are made. But if story books and plays are also the stuff of one's reality, what choice is there?