Kenneth Tynan

by Kirk Woodward

[For the serious theater student, especially those of us who came of intellectual age in the second half of the 20th century, the name Kenneth Tynan represented something important.  William Goldman’s The Season, his account of the New York theater scene of 1967-68, is chock-a-block with quoted comments from Tynan’s reviews.

[Tynan wrote perceptively—and literately—about “plays, personalities, problems and ideas” of the world of theater in England and the U.S. (and nations beyond), but he also influenced the theater of his time.  It should be noted that “his time” was the post-war years of the middle of the 20th century when the theater and, indeed, all the arts were changing into “modern.”

[In other words, the influence he wielded on the culture of the 1950s and ’60s lived long past his early and untimely death at 53. 

[According to Tynan’s second wife, Kathleen (1937-95), playwright Tom Stoppard said at the critic’s memorial service that he was “the product of our time . . . but our time was of his making.”  According to the editor of Tynan’s writings on theater, he influenced the evolution of the whole of post-war theater in Britain.  I don’t believe he was being hyperbolic. 

[I think ROTters will find Kirk Woodward, a generous contributor to Rick On Theater, has captured some of that in his profile of Tynan.  The writing of this post was inspired, I believe, by Kirk’s reading of Kenneth Tynan: Theatre Writings, selections of Tynan’s reviews.]

Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980) flashed like a meteor through the performance world. He would hate that simile, because he was a stylish, impeccable writer.

He was born in Birmingham, England. His middle name was “Peacock,” and he learned after the death of his father that the man he knew as “Peter Tynan” was also “Sir Peter Peacock,” who had a completely different life and a large family in another city.

The theatricality of this situation seems almost too remarkable, something that one would find hard to believe in fiction. However, Tynan appears to have been “theatrical” from the start. Paul Johnson (b. 1928) describes in his invaluable book Intellectuals (Harper, revised 2007) how, at Oxford,

when the new term opened, I was an awestruck freshman-witness to his arrival at the Magdalen Lodge. I stared in astonishment at this tall, beautiful, epicene youth, with pale yellow locks, Beardsley cheekbones, fashionable stammer, plum coloured suit, lavender tie and ruby signet-ring. . . . He seemed to fill the lodge with his possessions and servitors whom he ordered about with calm and imperious authority. . . . At Oxford he dressed in princely style at a time when clothes-rationing was still strictly enforced. . . . He thus restored Oxford’s reputation for aesthetic extravagance.

Peacock indeed! One might expect such a flamboyant character to be a wastrel or, at best, a dilettante. On the contrary, Tynan had a career that, considering how young he died, was remarkably full. He acted a bit, apparently competently.  He directed a great deal, but then felt he had failed. He wrote screenplays, at least two of which were produced (Nowhere to Go, 1958; Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, 1971). He became theater reviewer for the London Evening Standard, The Observer, and, in the United States, The New Yorker, for which he also later wrote a celebrated series of “Profiles.”

As a reviewer he was extraordinarily influential. He championed the plays and directorial approach of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and did a great deal to popularize them. He also promoted the “angry young man” drama Look Back in Anger (1956) by John Osborne (1929-1994), with the result that the play had an enormous impact on British theater.

He then in 1963 became the Literary Manager for the new National Theatre of Great Britain, serving in that capacity alongside its Artistic Director, Laurence Olivier (1907-1989), until both of them stepped down in 1973, and, in that capacity, he was involved in the selection of some 70 plays for the company’s repertory, most of them successful and many of them daring.

Tynan was also the initiator and producer of the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! (1969), which perhaps not everyone would count as a great achievement, but which ran for a remarkable number of performances in its original production and in revivals.

Part of Tynan’s creed, in fact, was to attack what we might call “Puritanical” attitudes, both about sex and about language. He spent a great deal of his energy on this project. An important result of his effort, and the efforts of others, was the end of government censorship of the theater in Great Britain under the Licensing Act (1737), through passage of the Theatres Act 1968.

A personal word about Oh! Calcutta! I have a copy – no idea where it came from – and I have tried to read it once or twice, but I simply cannot stand the thing. It seems to me to prove conclusively that sex in plays can be an important component – Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) would agree – but only in a context of characters, which I can’t find in Oh! Calcutta! at all. Of course it’s a revue rather than a play, but I doubt that that makes much difference.

In any case, Tynan was definitely no dilettante – he had a profound effect on the theater of his time, and by extension, on ours. It is well worth the effort, if that’s the word, to look at his theater reviews and writings. First, however, we should note that simply as a writer – just as a person who puts words down on paper (in his time) or whatever – he was superlative.

He never got over his fondness for puns – really good puns, to tell the truth:

            (Of the reviewer George Jean Nathan, 1882-1958)

Admittedly, we all make mystiques.

(On a week in which two separate productions of Richard II opened)

An embarrassment of Richards.

            (On a boring play involving a cat-killing)

Another distraction [from the ennui of the play] might be to work out an appropriate epigraph for Tabitha: the best I could summon up was: “Home is where you hang your cat.”

The selection assembled in Kenneth Tynan: Theatre Writings (Quite Specific Media Group, 2007) reveals, in its early entries, a writer determined to demonstrate how widely he has read, and his prose is self-consciously overripe. As he goes along, he modifies this tendency.

Even from his earliest reviews, however, he has the gift of letting you see what he sees. It is tempting simply to quote him at length. Here for example is the first paragraph of a review from 10 April 1953:

The present revival of The Wandering Jew [by E. Temple Thurston, 1879-1933] is one of the most reassuring theatrical experiences in years. Have we really progressed so far? In 1920 the play survived 390 performances; today not a line of it but rings flat and false.

Notice how in that quotation the little word “survived” prepares us for what’s coming. We see that he had no difficulty identifying failure; it is no wonder he was feared as a reviewer. He could also write ear-perfect parodies, as in this review of the musical Guys and Dolls (1953):

What happens next but The Sky gets bopped by religion and shoots craps with Nathan and the boys for their immortal souls. And where do the sinners wind up, with their chalk-striped suits and busted noses, but at a prayer meeting in the doll’s mission house, which hands me a very big laugh indeed.

One sees him in 1954 drawing battle lines against what he considers the mediocrity of the English theater:

The bare fact is that, apart from revivals and imports, there is nothing in the London theatre that one dares discuss with an intelligent man for more than five minutes. Since the great Ibsen challenge of the nineties, the English intellectuals have been drifting away from drama.

Unwilling to put up with this state of affairs, Tynan, like George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) before him, resolves to cause tumult:

I counsel aggression because, as a critic, I had rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist.

He selects the theatrical “causes” he will champion and fights for them fiercely.  First Brecht:

A Brechtian, let me explain, is one who believes that low drama with high principles is better than high principles with no audience; that the worst plays are those which depend wholly on suspense and the illusion of reality; and that the drama of the future will be a wedding of song and narrative in which neither partner marries beneath itself.

Then came Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, and the “realistic,” “angry young man,” “kitchen sink” drama that followed:

Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is . . . . I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.              

And he was greatly encouraged by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, which had produced Osborne’s play and others in the same vein:

To an extent unknown since the Ibsen riots, it has made drama a matter of public controversy. It has buttonholed us with new voices, some of them bawdy, many of them irreverent, and all of them calculated to bring gooseflesh to the evening of Aunt Edna’s life. It has raised hackles, Cain laughs and the standards of English dramaturgy.

(“Aunt Edna” was the imaginary audience member for whom the playwright Terrence Rattigan, 1911-1977, said he wrote.)

He noted that the English stage presented almost no satire, and very soon after was delighted by the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe (1961 in London), the bellwether of the astonishing wave of British satire that brought us Monty Python’s Flying Circus (on the BBC from 1969 to 1974):

Future historians may well thank me for providing them with a full account of the moment when English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the twentieth century.

And, from first to last, Tynan campaigned for the creation of a National Theatre, which did take place, as noted above, in 1963, and for which Tynan became Literary Manager.

Tynan did not, however, champion the “Theater of the Absurd” in general, although he highly praised Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), first staged in London in 1955 and widely considered the supreme example of that approach. In his review of Godot, he wrote:

I care little for its enormous success in Europe over the past three years, but much for the way in which it pricked and stimulated my own nervous system. It summoned the music-hall and the parable to present a view of life which banished the sentimentality of the music-hall and the parable’s fulsome uplift. It forced me to re-examine the rules which have hitherto governed the drama; and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough. It is validly new, and hence I declare myself, as the Spanish would say, godotista.

With respect to the genre however, he criticized

the pessimism that has driven so many young writers in Paris and New York to declare that true verbal communication between human beings is nowadays impossible.

Of “The Chairs” (1952, first performed in London in 1955) by Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994), he wrote:

This world [of the play] is not mine, but I recognize it to be a valid personal vision, presented with great imaginative aplomb and verbal audacity. The peril arises when it is held up for general emulation as the gateway to the theatre of the future, that bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief in man will forever be banished.

He and Ionesco carried on a lively newspaper debate, which can be found in Ionesco’s Notes & Counter Notes (Grove Press, 1964), a collection of writings well worth reading. (I have written about Ionesco elsewhere in this blog [“Eugene Ionesco,” 2 July 2013].) Tynan posits Ionesco as the “messiah” of a new school of playwrighting. Ionesco denies such an intention and slyly suggests that Tynan may be the one looking for a “messiah.” A hit, a palpable hit.

[I have posted several reports on productions of Ionesco plays on Rick On Theater: “Rhinoceros,” 15 October 2012; “Three Ionesco Plays (2004),” 17 July 2013.  ~Rick]

Interestingly, he did not embrace arena staging (“theater in the round”), which one hears periodically touted as a superior way to present plays. Tynan calls it

a method which overrates the importance of ‘intimacy’ in the theatre and, by citing the circus as a vindication of its creed, overlooks the fact that of the two most exciting things that happen in a circus one takes place behind bars and the other hundreds of feet in the air.

I can’t help comparing Tynan’s writings on theater to those of Eric Bentley (1916-2020), about whom I have written elsewhere in this blog [“Eric Bentley – An Appreciation,” 4 December 2012; “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw,” 3 December 2015; ]. Tynan in general provides closer descriptions of particular productions and performances than Bentley, who is typically more focused on play than players.

Both Tynan and Bentley hoped for careers as directors. (Bentley actually directed Tynan in a production of Him by E. E. Cummings, 1894-1962.) Both lost confidence in their ability to direct, but the loss appears to have hit Tynan harder – his second wife, Kathleen Tynan (1937-1995), wrote that “One of the saddest things about Ken was that he really wanted to be a director more than a writer – much more . . . .”  

Still, his directing experience informs his writing, and makes it possible for him to suggest, not just generalities, but specific important aspects of performances that actors might even want to fix. For example, evaluating Laurence Olivier as King Lear, he writes:

He gave a moderate Lear at the New [Theatre], built up out of a few tremendous tantrums of impotence . . . and an infinite run of cadenzas on his four most overworked tricks: (1) the stabbing finger; (2) the jaw and eye movement; (3) the ceaseless fits of wrestling with his cloak, like a tortoise with claustrophobia; and (4) the nervously nodding head.

By all accounts, actors feared Tynan’s criticism. From this distance, however, and not being the performers involved, he does not strike me as brutal, like, say, John Simon (1925-2019), but candid and precise [see “‘Moron! Vermin! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!!’: John Simon (1925-2019),” 28 November and 1, 4, and 7 December 2019]. One almost always feels, “I understand what he’s talking about.”

Tynan is certainly more the literary stylist than Bentley. For me, however, comparing, for example, both writers’ description of a Paris theatrical season, Tynan is informative but not revelatory, while I find new insights in Bentley’s account (in the collection In Search of Theater, 1953) every time I read it.

The difference may be that Tynan is genuinely a reviewer, and Bentley is genuinely a critic. To put it another way, Tynan is brilliant about moments, but Bentley is even better about movements. Tynan believed that a review

is a letter addressed to the future; to people thirty years hence who may wonder exactly what it felt like to be in a certain playhouse on a certain distant night. The critic is their eyewitness; and he has done his job if he evokes, precisely and with all his prejudices clearly charted, the state of his mind after the performance has impinged on it.

I do not agree completely with this job description of the reviewer (in which he calls the reviewer a critic), but in any case Tynan lives up to it. He writes fluidly and leaves you no doubt as to what he’s describing. He is a first-rate reporter – albeit one with ideas and an attitude.

Tynan today may be as well known for his articles about performers, collected in Profiles (1990, Random House), as he is for his reviews. According to his son, Tynan proposed to write an autobiography (which he did not live to do), and

A major theme of the book, . . . will be attempts – as journalist, propagandist, and impresario – to celebrate talent and make more room in the world for it to flourish.

This intention is interesting, because, as I mentioned, Tynan had a reputation as a fearsome reviewer, but Profiles could have been titled Appreciations. Without exception the 50 pieces in the book focus on what makes the subjects of the profile – all of them in the performance field except a couple of early friends – remarkable.

Tynan was not shy and he got around, and he knew all but a handful of the people described in Profiles, among them C. S. Lewis (1898-1963, under whom Tynan studied at Oxford), Orson Welles (1915-1985), Miles Davis (1926-1991 – Tynan loved jazz and knew it well), Lenny Bruce (1925-1966), Noel Coward (1899-1973), and, surprisingly, Greta Garbo (1905-1990). He may have been an intimidating reviewer but in Profiles his genuine interest in people shines through.

In the longer profiles in the book (most of these were written for The New Yorker), Tynan spends considerable time with his subjects, and the results are notable. In particular, he accompanied the unpredictable actor Nicol Williamson (1936-2011) as he prepared and finally managed to deliver an evening of selections from plays for President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) at the White House. The account is unspeakably funny; I wish I could quote it all, as Tynan struggles, largely without success, to keep pace with Williamson’s erratic behavior and insecurities.

In fact, Tynan is frequently funny. One example out of many: describing a production in which Orson Welles uses a fake nose, Tynan writes:

Sir Laurence Olivier began his film of Hamlet with the statement that it was ‘the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind’. At one point Mr. Welles’s new appendage started to leave its moorings, and Moby Dick nearly became the tragedy of a man who could not make up his nose.

And he can be delightfully aphoristic:

A playwright is a man who can forget himself long enough to be other people; and a poet is a man who can forget other people long enough to be himself.

A melodrama is a play whose author is more interested in the impact events are having on his audience than in their impact on his characters.

Comedy, perhaps, is merely tragedy in which people don’t give in.

Ancient tragedy puts the question: ‘How are we to live?’ Modern tragedy asks: ‘How am I to live?’ That is the vital difference.

It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness.

You cannot persuade an audience that people are related simply by making them call each other bastards.

Those who devote themselves to making silk purses out of sows’ ears are in duty bound to go the whole hog.

Nothing is more crucially stupid than to deride the artistic achievements of a social class because one deplores its historical record.

I once defined a critic as a man who knew the way but couldn’t drive the car.

Theater doesn’t give its practitioners happy endings; it only gives good moments. For all his brilliance – or perhaps because of it – Tynan seems to have been in varying degrees dissatisfied with his life. Like the rest of us, he could only impose his will on the world so far. He was a lifelong heavy smoker, exasperating a congenital lung condition, and died absurdly young at 53.

Still, if there is a recurring theme in Profiles, it might be said to be, “Make something of yourself,” and that he did.

[Kirk disagrees with what he quotes Tynan as saying that “a review ‘is a letter addressed to the future,’” but I find it spot-on—especially from the perspective of the research I’ve often done to reconstruct productions.  I’ve used reviews a lot as a resource for production descriptions—even little details that I can compile from several notices.  In that sense, the reviewers are my “eyewitnesses.” 

[Many reviewers see themselves as theatrical consumer reporters.  When I was researching “The Power of the Reviewer—Myth or Fact?” (23 and 26 January 2011), there were several surveys in which theater journalists were asked how they saw their jobs; “consumer reporter” was a very popular answer

[When I shared this remark with Kirk, he responded: “No contradiction here, except that even Tynan wasn’t just writing for the future, he was also writing for tomorrow morning.”  I see my performance reports for Roger as a record of what I experienced.

[I’ve always considered the play reports on ROT as a kind of record of what I saw.  That’s why I do the review round-up and the backgrounds of the plays and productions and the profiles of the playwrights.  When I write about a theater or company I haven’t covered before, I do a description or profile of that, too—to get it on the record.  None of that usually appears in any review (which is why I don’t call them that!).]