Kenneth Tynan
Overview
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial English
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

 critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

 and writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

.
He was born in Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

 to Letitia Rose Tynan and (as he was led to believe) "Peter Tynan" (though see below). As a child, he stammered but possessed early on a high degree of articulate intelligence. By the age of six, he was already keeping a diary
Diary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...

. At King Edward's School, Birmingham
King Edward's School, Birmingham
King Edward's School is an independent secondary school in Birmingham, England, founded by King Edward VI in 1552. It is part of the Foundation of the Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham, and is widely regarded as one of the most academically successful schools in the country, according to...

, he was a brilliant student of whom one of his masters said, "He was the only boy I could never teach anything." Always clothed foppishly in that all-boy public school, he played the lead as Doctor Parpalaid in an English translation of Jules Romains
Jules Romains
Jules Romains, born Louis Henri Jean Farigoule , was a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement...

' farce Knock.
Quotations

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Foreword, p. viii

When you've seen all of Eugène Ionesco|Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.

Review of Victims of Duty by Eugène Ionesco (1960), p. 36

A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence.

Review of The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton|Thomas Middleton (1961), p. 75

We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it.

Review of Altona, by Jean-Paul Sartre (1961), p. 97

The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.

"Anatomy of the Absurd" (1962), p. 104

How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.

Review of Le Misanthrope, by Molière, at the Piccadilly (1962), p.117

When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.

Review of After the Fall, by Arthur Miller, at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, New York; Blues for Mister Charlie, by James Baldwin at the ANTA Theatre, New York (1962), p. 143

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."

"Conference at Edinburgh" (1963), p. 146

Does the critic wish to influence the kind of film that costs more than £250,000? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors explaining that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car.

"Footnote on Cinema" (undated), p. 260

 
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