DA

Last year I was asked to play Da in Hugh Leonard’s play of the same name. Without hesitation and without being asked twice I said yes. I still had the script I had used twenty five years ago when I had played Charlie, the son, in a great production in the Abbey, but my French’s edition was dog eared, torn, Charlie’s lines all underlined, his moves all written in my own hand, but I wanted to use this copy, so I marked all Da’s lines with green highlighter. Opening the script was like meeting old friends after a long separation, Mary Tate AKA the Yellow Peril, Mr.Drumm, Oliver, Mrs.Prynne, Charlie and his young alter ego, and of course, Mother and Da.
When I played Charlie it was like putting on a comfortable glove every night, and now Da fitted like the other glove of the pair.
There isn’t a dud line in the play. Leonard uses the stage as Charlie’s mind: people he remembers appear and re-enact events from his life as a teenager in Dalkey. The brilliance of the play is the way the author allows the action to move forward and backward in time, the two Charlies converse even when the younger one is involved in a scene with other characters.
I have played in five Leonard plays, but to do the double, to play Charlie and then to play Da a generation later is a pleasure not many actors experience. To have two goes at this funny, sad, sharp-as-a-razor masterwork was a rare treat, and the line that summarises Leonard’s play for me is when Charlie says after Young Charlie’s bitter row with his mother ”It took me a long time to realise that love turned upside down is love for all that”.

CLIVE GERAGHTY.

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