Hugh Leonard, who died in Dublin last week aged 82, was largely forgotten as a playwright but ever renowned as a dyspeptic newspaper columnist and fearsome wit in the great tradition of Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

He took no prisoners. The Dublin theatre critic Michael Ross was labelled “a diarrhoeal horse’s backside” and the distinguished intellectual Fintan O’Toole dismissed as an incubus. He greeted the news that his old adversary Ulick O’Connor was in hospital with the remark, “It must have been something he wrote.”

And he loved debunking the image of Ireland as a warm and welcoming tourist destination: “Much disillusionment has been wreaked by travel brochures that rhapsodize over the friendliness of the Irish, when all the visitor is likely to receive is common civility. We keep our distance…the conversation in pubs, say the advertisements put out by the Tourist Board, is sparkling with epigrams. This is fiction. What you get is one monologuist waiting for another monologuist to pause for breath.”

For many years Leonard was a valued reviewer on Plays and Players, where his reviews were easily the best written and most amusing among a range of great contributors including Charles Marowitz, Alan Brien, Sandy Wilson, Helen Dawson, Martin Esslin, Frank Marcus and upstart newcomers like Michael Billington and Robert Cushman.

Once, covering a revival of Arms and the Man, he described Shaw as a lunatic chef: “In one act, he poured half of his ingredients into the cooking pot; in act two, he added the other half and gave the mixture a stir; and in act three, instead of serving the dish, he turned off the gas and sat around telling the diners how delicious it was.”

He was literally incapable of writing a dull sentence, or suppressing a well-turned jibe. Some of this came through in his plays, the best of which, Da — an autobiographical study of a successful playwright who returns home after the death of his adoptive father, his “da” — won four Tonys on Broadway in 1978, for best play, best director, best actor and best featured actor.

Other plays included a brilliant conflation of two James Joyce works, Stephen D (1962), The Patrick Pearse Motel (1971), a scintillating attack on the Dublin vodka-and-bitter-lemon belt, the elegiac comedy of reminiscence Summer (1974) and the strangely anarchic Time Was (1976) in which dead relatives and characters from old movies invaded an evening of suburban socialising.

He was a great figure in the Dublin Theatre Festival — he was programme director in 1978 — despite his penchant for falling out with everyone. Someone once said that his fiercest enemies were his closest friends. He had no time for clubbiness among writers. “An Irish literary movement,” he said, “is when two playwrights are on speaking terms.”

An autodidact and voracious reader, generally known as “Jack” (”Hugh Leonard” was itself a pseudonym for John Keyes Byrne), he worked as a civil service clerk for fourteen years before achieving a breakthrough, and was passionate about travel and cats.

Throughout his career, he wrote television plays and screen adaptations of masterpieces such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby; he saw little point in footling around with minor stuff, and his scripts set a standard that has rarely been equalled, let alone surpassed.

There’s too little devilry in our theatre or indeed our public life, and Leonard’s death diminishes it further. Mediocrities, pseuds and self-servers can breathe a corporate sigh of relief. They’ll be able to carry on getting away with it much more easily now the ferocious and unforgiving gaze of Hugh Leonard has been sadly dimmed.

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