Tynan / Shellard Kenneth Tynan: Theatre Writings

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78001-069-4
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

The best of Kenneth Tynan's theatre criticism, selected and edited by his biographer Dominic Shellard - with a foreword by Tom Stoppard. This volume is an edited selection of theatre criticism by one of the most significant and influential writers on British theatre. Spanning the years 1944 to 1965, it includes all of Tynan's major theatre reviews and articles written for the Evening Standard, the Daily Sketch and the Observer. It also includes the text of his substantial 1964 speech to the Royal Society of Arts, setting out his vision for the National Theatre. Tynan's writings on theatre, according to eminent theatre historian Dominic Shellard, influenced the evolution of the whole of post-war theatre in Britain. And, with their characteristic mix of hyperbole, irreverence and prescience, they remain brilliantly entertaining today. 'You can open this book on almost any page and come across a phrase or a vignette which is the next best thing to having been there' Tom Stoppard, from his Foreword

Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980) was a highly influential drama critic, writer, literary manager and theatre producer. He is above all revered for his incisive, passionate and stylish theatre criticism, and his Profiles of a wide variety of writers and performers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tynan, Kenneth

Shellard, Dominic

Leseproben

Introduction

Who was Kenneth Tynan?

At various times in the past fifty years, he has been seen as a precocious Oxford undergraduate, with a penchant for purple doeskin suits and gold satin shirts; a voluble representative of the post-war generation that became tired of the conservatism of the 1950s; the Dramaturg of the new National Theatre;1 the first person to say ‘fuck’ on British television; the producer of the sexually frank Oh! Calcutta!; or the author of a compelling diary, which revealed him to be an enthusiast for spanking black prostitutes.

There is no doubt that Tynan led a fascinating, if somewhat melancholic, life, but his supreme achievement is the subject of this collection: the literary output of the theatre reviews and articles that he produced for the Evening Standard (1951), the Daily Sketch (1953–54) and primarily for the Observer (1954–63).

Tynan came to theatre reviewing in a roundabout way. Whilst at Oxford, he became widely known for directing plays, such as a blood-spattered Samson Agonistes, an avant-garde Winterset and a first Quarto Hamlet, whose promise was such that it drew three notable former princes to its première in 1948, Donald Wolfit, Paul Scofield and Robert Helpmann. At this point, Tynan first made contact with the man who was to act both as his friendly rival and critical foil for the next decade, Harold Hobson. Hobson, a remarkable man himself, had survived being struck by polio at the age of seven to become the theatre critic of the Sunday Times in 1947. A year later, having been contacted for advice by Tynan about finding a publisher for a collection of articles on post-war British theatre, Hobson generously introduced him to his own, Mark Longman, and then went to review the transfer of Tynan’s Hamlet at the Rudolf Steiner Hall in London for another paper that he wrote for, the Christian Science Monitor. He described the director, ‘Ken Tynan of Magdalen’, as

a long, lean, dialectically brilliant young man who seems to occupy in the contemporary University a position pretty similar to that of Harold Acton when I was up.

In other words, Mr. Tynan appears to be the mascot of, as well as the driving force behind, those cultural experiments of which Oxford, when at its best, is usually full. Undoubtedly he is a man of ideas, several of which he has crammed into his own production of Hamlet which, travestied as it is by its own text, he does not hesitate high-spiritedly to travesty still further by the lively pranks of his direction.2

Emboldened by this exposure, Tynan accepted the artistic directorship of the David Garrick Theatre in Lichfield, whose patron and financial backer was Joan Cowlishaw. Tynan’s youthful energy, infectious confidence and ambitious plans had appealed to her, and he was engaged to produce the familiar repertory of light entertainment and the occasional more serious work. But he quickly discovered that there was a world of difference between the cosseted world of the university and the financial grind of weekly rep. For a start, the turnover of plays was colossal – Tynan directed twenty-four in twenty-four weeks – and this inevitably put a limit to the amount of exciting experimentation that had initially fired him. In August 1949, having been at Lichfield for almost twenty weeks and already directed, among others, The Beaux Stratagem, Anna Christie, Arsenic and Old Lace and Present Laughter, he confided to Harry James, a theatre friend from his home city of Birmingham, that the experience had changed his artistic priorities:

The first thing one looks for in a weekly rep actor is his ability to learn lines quickly. That qualification romps away with the field: a photographic memory puts a man way ahead of his rivals: there is no photo-finish. My error has been engaging people who weren’t accustomed to weekly; because I daren’t admit to myself the over-riding importance of this knack: I now, with infinite regret and reluctance, turn away excellent players because they just cannot learn and remember – fine, flexible versatile people who won’t and can’t stuff a part down their throats in five or six rehearsals.3

Tynan was not the only one who doubted that he could cut it in rep. Productions of Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pygmalion and Rookery Nook tumbled out, but Joan Cowlishaw began to have doubts about the young director’s ability to temper his ambition with a necessary pragmatism. When he wanted to set Garrick’s adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew in the deep south of America, her patience snapped, and he was brusquely dismissed.

Unbowed, Tynan relocated to London, where he was engaged by the most significant theatre company in the West End, H.M.Tennent Ltd, to direct C.E.Webber’s A Citizen of the World at the Lyric, Hammersmith. It was another step up the ladder, and Hobson again gave the show a favourable review. Tynan finally seemed to be inching towards the theatrical big-time.

Buoyed up by the experience of directing at the leading try-out venue in London and the successful première of A Citizen of the World as a Sunday night production in the West End’s Phoenix theatre, Tynan turned back to his nearly completed book. With his customary panache, he decided that he needed a theatre celebrity to write a contribution, and he managed to pull off the considerable coup of persuading Orson Welles, his boyhood hero, to write the preface to the work, which now largely focused on the current state of theatre criticism, heroic acting in Britain and the demands of tragedy in drama.

After he had directed a touring production of Othello for the embryonic Arts Council, He That Plays the King was published in October 1950. All of Tynan’s adolescent precocity, undergraduate flair and delight in the irreverent were bundled into its 255 pages. Respect for age, achievement and tradition was still strong in post-war Britain, but Tynan’s outspoken opinions signalled his hostility to unquestioning deference, earning him further notice and notoriety.

It was at this point, though, in the spring of 1951, that he received a setback that crushed him. Alec Clunes, who ran the Arts Theatre Club – a private theatre which, its prospectus claimed, existed to oppose ‘the monotony of the leg-show and the dullness of the average West End drawing-room piece’4 – had appointed Tynan to direct a translation of Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, entitled Intimate Relations. It promised to be a significant engagement, since the famous actress, Fay Compton, had been cast as the mother. This was a major boost for the venue, since Compton had already enjoyed a long and distinguished career, carving out key roles for Somerset Maugham in the twenties, Dodie Smith in the thirties and Noël Coward in the forties, as well as playing Ophelia to the separate Hamlets of Barrymore and Gielgud. On his return from honeymoon – he had married Elaine Dundy in January 1951 – Tynan set up a miniature theatre in his sitting room, around which he moved cut-outs of the performers for hours. He had very definite views about the role of the director, which he explained in He That Plays the King. The director, or producer as the role was called in the fifties, stood ‘as locum tenens for the author: shaping, easing, smoothing, tightening, heightening, lining and polishing the thing made, the play.’5 He was responsible for ensuring ‘wholeness of conception, shape and completeness’ and needed to be respected and obeyed.

For an actress who believed in the inateness of her skill (a common belief at that time), this was difficult for Compton to swallow, and there was a clash of personalities from the very beginning. Although Tynan had undertaken detailed preparations, his decision to show a screening of Cocteau’s film of the play to the cast proved disastrous, as many of them felt that Tynan’s innovations were actually derivative. Compton rose up and demanded that he be fired or that she would leave the show. Clunes was in an agony of indecision. As a supporter of progressive theatre, and well aware of Tynan’s cachet following the publication of He That Plays the King, he was inclined to back his brash, opinionated director, but as an artistic director he knew the value of Compton to the box office. Reluctantly, he decided that Tynan had to go but was so nervous about breaking the news that he asked the theatre’s publicist, William Wordsworth, to do so. Wordsworth understandably did not feel that this was his job, so after tossing a coin, the unenviable task was handed to Brian Mellor, the Arts Theatre’s Manager. A new director, Judith Furse, was then hurriedly drafted in to salvage the play.6

Tynan was devastated by what he felt to be a supreme humiliation, and he lost his appetite for directing, not out of any desire to withdraw from practical theatre, but from a crippling fear of rejection. This, together with a pervasive sense that he really ought to be practically involved in theatre, was to hang over him for the rest of his life. Kathleen Tynan, his second wife, made this point to Laurence Olivier in an illuminating unpublished interview, conducted in August 1983 when she was researching her biography of Tynan, and now housed in the Tynan archive at the British Library:

One of the saddest things about Ken was...