Kenneth Tynan’s second name was Peacock, and thereby hangs a strange story, a style of writing and a way of living. Today, 25 years after he choked and gasped his way to an ugly death from emphysema at the age of 53, he still glitters in my memory and, clearly, other people’s memories and imaginations too. On Monday Corin Redgrave brings to the West End the solo version of Tynan’s candid, funny, painful diaries that impressed everyone in Stratford last year, and on March 2 Rob Brydon plays him in a 60-minute play on BBC Four, Kenneth Tynan: In Praise of Hardcore.
All this for someone who was most successful as a theatre critic, a class of person usually seen secretively flitting through the night, like a bat, burglar or witch. But Tynan’s reviews blended incisiveness with a colour even Shaw didn’t match. What else would you expect of the glorious exhibitionist who, reacting against his illegitimate origins and dull upbringing, determined to ensure that he lit up postwar Britain?
Though Tynan didn’t discover the fact until he was an Oxford undergraduate, the father who called himself Peter Tynan but spent only part of the week with Kenneth’s mother in Birmingham wasn’t married to her. He was Sir Peter Peacock and six times the Mayor of Warrington, where he had a wife and a second, posher, family. Writing of his own difficult birth while he was undergoing psychoanalysis in 1962, Tynan called himself “a Caesarian, a bastard and a contemptible object”. He might have added, a stammerer, for, though his conversation was elegant and witty, it came in odd jerks. “I always pretended to be somebody — anybody — else,” he wrote, again in 1962.
Indeed he did. At Oxford this tapering, emaciated man reminded people partly of the aesthete Aubrey Beardsley, partly of Oscar Wilde, dressing (as he did) in suits made of purple doeskin or billiard baize and writing with precocious flair in university magazines. Indeed, he collected his reviews into a book, published when he was just 23, under the telling title of He Who Plays the King. At that time Tynan thought that great drama was about great men: “This sad age needs to be dazzled, shaped and spurred by the spectacle of heroism.”
He never lost his fascination with the charismatic. He was, in his words, a “talent snob”, and counted Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich among many famous friends. The admiration for Laurence Olivier, Donald Wolfit and the other actors he celebrated with such eloquence never left him either. And though both his views and his literary style matured, his work remained a bit mannered, even stilted. Yet, as the dramatist John Whiting conceded, Tynan wrote “fiendishly well ”, boldly enrolling simile, metaphor, anecdote, wit and more wit into the reviews he wrote initially for the Sketch and Standard and, from 1954 to 1963, for The Observer.
Advertisement
Especially in the early days he could be cruel, for instance to Vivien Leigh who, as Cleopatra, “picked at the part with the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag”, and Ralph Richardson, whose Macbeth was “a sad facsimile of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz” and “a teddy bear snapped in a bad light by a child holding its first camera”. He could also be exhilarating, as in the 1956 review of Look Back in Anger that made John Osborne’s name and did much to give a bland British theatre the social bite for which he was crusading.
In that notice he famously said he couldn’t love anybody who didn’t want to see Anger: a remark that, as we were to discover from his long-suffering second wife’s biography and then his diaries, was double-edged. By his own admission, love increasingly came to mean sex and sex increasingly meant sado-masochism, primarily the spanking of a full-time mistress and assorted tarts. It was inadvertently hilarious when the cleanliness campaigner Mary Whitehouse declared that Tynan should have his bottom smacked for saying “fuck” on television in 1965. He would have liked nothing more.
Myself, I was watching the box when he released the f-word from the closet. You could see he knew what he was doing by his self-conscious attempt at unselfconsciousness when, looking coyly down, he delivered it. And it brought him the notoriety he craved: motions in Parliament, denunciations in pulpits, and many letters, including one reading “You are a dirty dog. For God’s sake shoot yourself and avoid further corruption.”
In and out of print he became a dedicated proselytiser for permissiveness, famously staging the sex revue Oh Calcutta! in 1970 while still somehow hanging on to his primary job, which by then was dramaturg at Laurence Olivier’s infant National Theatre Company. That was a role he fulfilled with distinction and some courage, battling resistance from the board to stage Adrian Mitchell’s play about Blake, Tyger, and, less successfully but more controversially, Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers, which accused Churchill of complicity in the death of General Sikorski.
I met Tynan several times and found him suave, pleasant but foxy. Apropos of nothing he tore into Peter Hall, who had found a new dramaturg when he took over the National, accusing him against all the evidence of “being interested only in money”. He also remarked that he wished he had had a sister, “so she could have taught me about sex”, and cadged the name of my GP, a gifted maverick who was prescribing liquid marijuana on the NHS. He went to see the doctor, too, hoping that pot might wean him off smoking; but that worked no better than hypnosis, aversion therapy, and the other “cures” for the addiction that was to kill him.
Advertisement
He was a contradictory person: an egoist and poseur with a big self-hatred problem, a hedonist who espoused socialism, an atheist who worshipped his old tutor, C. S. Lewis, a humanitarian whose favourite sport was bullfighting, a man who could be very silly yet was undeniably serious. Over his desk he pinned his credo as a critic — “rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds” — and he followed it.
He could be wrong. He failed to recognise Pinter’s originality and underrated Beckett. But he brought great performances vividly alive and, by his attacks on the flaccid drama of the mid-20th century, prepared the way for the renaissance that began in 1956. His evocation of a “Loamshire Play” (how he defined a quintessentially British drawing room drama) — “a glibly codified fairytale world of no more use to the student of life than a doll’s house to a student of town planning” — is the most devastating rebuke to triviality I know.
“A good critic perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time, a great critic also perceives what is not happening,” he wrote, and by that standard he was a great critic. Tom Stoppard, whose Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead he brought to the National stage and whose Jumpers he commissioned, paid twin tributes to him: “He made you want to be better” and “he was part of the luck we had”. What more could a theatre critic wish?
Tynan is at the Arts Theatre, Great Newport Street, London WC2 (020-7836 3334), until March 26