Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynanwas an English theatre critic and writer. Making his initial impact as a critic at The Observer, he praised Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and encouraged the emerging wave of British theatrical talent. In 1963, Tynan was appointed as the new National Theatre Company's literary manager...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth2 April 1927
hands fists performing
Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clenches his fist.
fear piano good-times
There, standing at the piano, was the original good time who had been had by all.
drama moving past
A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.
food taste bread
Among the classic tastes: bread sauce, Nuits St Georges Les Perdrix 1962, Worcestershire sauce, Toblerone and Bovril.
play cities good-man
A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.
wise wisdom people
If there's one thing I can't bear, it's people who are wise during the event.
doubt wish looks
I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.
past cities immediacy
A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.
oysters pearls disease
Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.
art essentials body
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.
communication writing cutting
All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad.
years sacred inarticulate
It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.
art spring coherence
Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.
indulge-in luxury despair
I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair.