Curtains

"Kenneth Tynan was a journalist. He wrote for The Observer from 1954 to the early 1960s, then wrote for The New Yorker , then became involved with the National Theatre as its first dramaturg. And then his later years were less spectacular, when he started producing erotic reviews. But to my generation he was the role model we aspired to, because he made dramatic criticism sexy and exciting and glamorous. I can’t tell you the kind of tingling excitement with which we picked up The Observer on a Sunday and turned to his reviews, because they were written with a voluptuous delight in language and also because they were filled with a missionary purpose. His aim was to bring British theatre into contact with the real world. That may sound obvious now, but think of the time he was writing. He was around when the Royal Court gets under way, he was there for the first performances of Look Back in Anger, he’s there just a bit earlier for the first performances of Waiting for Godot . So he’s there at the key moment when British theatre is changing. So Tynan became a kind of interpreter and encourager of the new movement in British drama. But above all, he just wrote so damned well! You can read any book of his, but Curtains is a big fat volume of criticism he published in 1961, since when there have been lots of other collections. One thing he did brilliantly was to vary the form of criticism. So in 1954 you find him doing a review of two plays by Terence Rattigan – Separate Tables, a very fine double bill set in a middle-class hotel. Tynan writes the review as a dialogue between the Young Perfectionist, ie Tynan, and Aunt Edna, who was the mythical (middlebrow) playgoer that Terence Rattigan invented. Tynan’s own divided reaction to the play is expressed in the dialogue form. So the two characters debate the virtues and vices of this play, why one person might like it and one might not. It’s very fair to the plays, and it ends with this wonderful exchange: YOUNG PERFECTIONIST: Will you accompany me on a second visit tomorrow? AUNT EDNA: With great pleasure. Clearly, there is something here for both of us. YOUNG PERFECTIONIST: Yes. But not quite enough for either of us. But one of his really great reviews is of a production of Moby Dick by Orson Welles in London in 1955. Tynan was a devotee of Welles, admired and idolised him. But he just summons up the texture, the feel of this obviously very radical production, and writes with a kind of wit that seduces the reader. Apart from that, he gives you a physical picture of the production. And what is very interesting is how Welles was anticipating the kind of theatre we have today, where you don’t represent things, you evoke them. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . ‘The real revelation was Mr Welles’s direction. The great, square, rope-hung vault of the bare stage, stabbed with light from every point of the compass, becomes by turns the Nantucket Wharf, the Whalers’ chapel, the deck of the Pequod, and the ocean itself.’ ‘Great, square, rope-hung vault of the bare stage’ gives you an absolute image of what Welles was doing. It’s almost like Brook and the empty space, although this was 1955, several years before that book. I think now Tynan may be either unread or unfashionable or not easy to find in bookshops, but I just think if you want to find out about the theatre we have today, then you have to read him. Well, there were many factors, but Tynan was one of them. I was at Oxford when he was at his height at The Observer . I actually made my print debut by entering an Observer competition. You had to parody one of the Observer contributors, so I did a parody of Kenneth Tynan, which won me £10. But the great thing was it made me feel, ‘Gosh, I can parody Kenneth Tynan.’ I think I’ve been parodying him ever since, by the way. But then he came down to Oxford to review a play about three weeks later, so of course I accosted him and introduced myself, and he couldn’t have been more helpful. He gave me the name of the literary editor of The Observer and suggested that I write to him. That’s just a tiny example of how, aside from being a supreme exponent of the art, he was also very encouraging to a young hopeful like myself."