Dr. Dilek Öztürk Yağcı is a lecturer in English Composition at Istanbul Technical University, School of Foreign Languages. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin, focusing on contemporary Irish drama through the framework of human geography. She holds a B.A. in English from Ankara University, an M.A. in English Literature from Boğaziçi University, where she focused on narrative presence and storytelling in Samuel Beckett’s drama, and a Ph.D. from Middle East Technical University, where she examined spatial dynamics in Brian Friel’s late plays. She has held a research fellowship at Queen’s University Belfast, collaborating with the Institute of Irish Studies and the Brian Friel Theatre. Her research specializes in contemporary British and Irish literature, theatre and performance studies, and studies of space, place, and environment. Her monograph, Re-Reading Brian Friel: Space, Place, and Text, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2025 as part of their Studies in Irish Literature series.

This study examines intersections of space, place and people in Hugh Leonard’s Summer (1974, revised 1988), a play that charts the shifting spaces and society of contemporary Ireland in the 1970s. As an Irish playwright who has often been criticised for not writing plays specifically addressing the “Irish Question,” Leonard has been marginally placed within the Irish dramatic canon, and his plays have received little critical attention. However, as it will be demonstrated through the analysis of Summer, Leonard’s plays are significant in their representations of new directions in Irish drama regarding the prevalent notions, ‘sense of place’ and ‘national identity.’ Summer dramatizes two picnics of three married couples in their early middle age, taking place ‘on a hillside overlooking Dublin’ with six years apart, in 1968 and 1974. Through such temporal framing, Leonard draws attention to the alterations place and society have undergone in the 1970s in Ireland, a globalising nation in the midst of a consumerist frenzy. Rather than navigating through the interior domestic spaces of the Irish peasant kitchen and perpetuating the myth of the Irish rural idyll, Leonard’s Summer, breaking the mould of Irish realism, maps and remaps the urban territories of Dublin city where the nouveau riche middle class reside with their mannerisms. Therefore, it will be argued that in Summer, Leonard’s portrayal of Ireland’s geographical locations reveals the dynamics of human-place relations in a new light going beyond the national and postcolonial concerns relating to Ireland and Irishness.

Keywords: Hugh Leonard, space, place, contemporary Irish drama, sense of place.