Kenneth Peacock Tynan (2 April 1927 – 26 July 1980) was an influential and often controversial English theatre critic and writer.
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He was born in Birmingham 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. At King Edward's School, Birmingham, 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' farce Knock. While at school he began smoking, which became a lifelong habit.
Tynan was 12 when World War II broke out. By the time the war ended, he had earned a scholarship to Oxford. Well before then he had adopted a fairly colourful set of views (and wardrobe items). During school debates he advocated repealing laws against homosexuality and abortion. During a school debate on the motion, "This House Thinks The Present Generation Has Lost The Ability To Entertain Itself" Tynan gave a speech on the pleasures of masturbation.
At Magdalen College, Oxford he lived flamboyantly but was already beginning to suffer from the effects of his heavy smoking. He did not discover until much too late that he had been born with a rare lung condition, which increased the damage done by smoking by a factor of 300.
The writer Paul Johnson, who was "an awestruck freshman-witness to his arrival at the Magdalen lodge" described Tynan as a "tall, beautiful, epicene youth, with pale yellow locks, Beardsley cheekbones, fashionable stammer, plum-coloured suit, lavender tie and ruby signet-ring." Unlike Johnson and Tynan, most undergraduates at the university had been through World War II, but were nevertheless "struck speechless" by Tynan's extravagant style.[1]
Hated by some, Tynan was nevertheless an intellectual and social leader among Oxford undergraduates, often made a splash ("during the whole of his time there he was easily the most talked-of person in the city") and had groupies ("a court of young women and admiring dons"), and gave sensational parties sometimes attended by London entertainment celebrities, Johnson wrote.[1]
He also produced and acted in plays, spoke "brilliantly" at the Oxford Union, wrote for and edited college magazines.[1] He retained a life-long admiration for his tutor at Oxford, C. S. Lewis, in spite of their marked differences in outlook.
In 1948, upon the death of Tynan's father -- the man he had known as Peter Tynan -- Tynan learned to his surprise that Peter Tynan was in reality an alias of Sir Peter Peacock, a former mayor of Warrington, who had been successfully leading a double life for more than 20 years, and who had a wife and another family back in Warrington. Tynan's mother was obliged to return Sir Peter's body to his wife and family in Warrington for burial. Tynan's discovery of his father's deception (and his mother's collusion) did long-term damage to his ability to trust others.
When Tynan was called up for National Service, he put on an act of appearing outrageously camp including wearing a floppy hat, velvet coat, painted fingernails and a great deal of Yardley scent. As a result he was rejected as 'medically unfit' for service.[2]
Three years later, on 25 January 1951, he married the author Elaine Dundy after a three-month romance. In the following year they had a daughter, Tracy (born 12 May 1952, Westminster, London), after Spencer Tracy, and asked Katharine Hepburn to be godmother, which she accepted.
Tynan's career took off in 1952 when he was hired as a theatre critic for the London Evening Standard. According to Johnson, Tynan "quickly established himself as the most audacious literary journalist in London. His motto was: 'Write heresy, pure heresy.' He pinned to his desk the exhilarating slogan: 'Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.'"[1] Two years later he left for The Observer, and it was there that he rose to prominence.
The timing for a witty, eloquent theatre critic was perfect. Tynan was highly critical of what he called 'the Loamshire play', a genre of English middle-class country-house drama which he felt dominated the early 1950s British stage, and was wasting the talents of playwrights and actors. But there was a significant development in the 1955-1956 British theatre season during which John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot premiered. Tynan championed Osborne's play, turning it into a hit, according to Johnson.[1] Tynan espoused a new theatrical realism, best exemplified in the works of the playwrights who became known as the "Angry Young Men".
"He became a power in the London theatre, which regarded him with awe, fear and hatred", Johnson wrote.[1] The reviewer "seemed to know all world literature" and studded his articles with such words as "esurient", "cateran", "cisisbeism" and "eretheism". From 1958 to 1960 he became known in the United States by contributing "some superb reviews" to The New Yorker.[1] Following this, he returned to The Observer where he remained its theatre critic until mid-1963 when he joined the National Theatre.
His marriage had become increasingly difficult in spite of his success (and Dundy's: she had published her first novel in 1958). Both had extramarital affairs (though his were much more blatant than hers) and he had developed a dependence on alcohol. His sexual tastes had always favored sadomasochism, which strained the marriage as well. Dundy wrote "To cane a woman on her bare buttocks, to hurt and humiliate her, was what gave him his greatest sexual satisfaction." Johnson wrote that "women seem to have objected less to his sadism, which took only a mild form, than to his vanity and authoritarianism. [...] He treated women as possessions. [...] Tynan, while reserving the unqualified right to be unfaithful himself, expected loyalty from his spouse." On one occasion, he returned from a meeting with his mistress to find a naked man in the kitchen with his wife. He threw the man's clothes down an elevator shaft.[1]
Francis Bacon, a painter renowned for his grotesque (and often gory) works, once smiled warmly at Tynan's daughter Tracy and declared her to be "as pretty as a picture". This was said to be one of the few times Tynan was ever shocked into silence.
Tynan co-wrote with Harold Lang, the actor, a radio play The Quest for Corbett (1956), which was broadcast at least twice in The BBC Third Programme in the mid-fifties. From 1956 -1958, Tynan was the script editor for Ealing Studios, and co-wrote with Seth Holt the film Nowhere to Go.[3] Tynan commissioned a film adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies from Nigel Kneale, but Ealing Studios closed in 1959 before it could be produced.
In 1963 Laurence Olivier became the British Royal National Theatre's first artistic director. Tynan had been highly dismissive of Olivier’s achievements as artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre, which had opened in 1962, but he recommended himself for the role of literary manager. Olivier was initially outraged by Tynan’s presumption but Olivier’s wife, Joan Plowright, convinced him that Tynan would be an asset at the National Theatre. When he became the National Theatre's literary manager, Tynan finished as The Observer theatre critic but would stay for several more years as its film reviewer.
At the National Theatre Tynan established for himself a global reputation, Johnson wrote: "Indeed at times in the 1960s he probably had more influence than anyone else in world theatre."[1] Tynan in particular played an important role in the National's choice of plays, pushing Olivier into more adventurous selections than his own instincts might have led him to. Altogether, some 79 plays were performed during Tynan’s period at the National Theate; 32 were his idea, and another 20 chosen with his collaboration. He also persuaded Olivier to play the title role in Shakespeare's Othello, something the actor had always been reluctant to do: Olivier's Othello opened at the National Theatre in 1964 to glowing reviews, and was filmed in 1965.
On 13 November 1965, Tynan participated in a live TV debate, broadcast as part of the BBC's late-night satirical show BBC-3. He was asked whether he would allow a play to be staged in which sexual intercourse was represented on the stage, and replied: “Well, I think so, certainly. I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word 'fuck' would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything which can be printed or said can also be seen." No recording survives of the programme, but Private Eye always maintained that Tynan’s stammer made it the first 3 syllable 4 letter word. This was the first time the word "fuck" had been spoken on British television. Johnson later called Tynan's use of the word "his masterpiece of calculated self-publicity", adding "for a time it made him the most notorious man in the country".[1]
In response to public outcry, the BBC was forced to issue a formal apology. In the House of Commons, four separate censuring motions were signed by a total of 133 Labour Party and Tory backbenchers. Mary Whitehouse, a frequent critic of the BBC over issues of "morals and decency", wrote a letter to the Queen, suggesting that Tynan should be reprimanded by having "his bottom spanked". The irony of Whitehouse's comment has been noted, given the later revelations of Tynan's fetish for flagellation.[4] The episode further encouraged Whitehouse in her campaign against the BBC; it also cut short Tynan's television career. Comedian Billy Connolly would later commemorate this event in his song "A Four-Letter Word".
The controversy was part of a larger, longstanding aim of Tynan's "of breaking down linguistic inhibitions on the stage and in print. No one in Britain played a bigger role in destroying the old system of censorship, formal and informal." In 1960 "after much manoeuvering", Tynan got the four-letter word into The Observer in an article about the Lady Chatterley Trial. His organization of Oh! Calcutta! in 1969 was another important victory in that campaign.[1] Tynan was fiercely against censorship and was determined to break taboos that he considered arbitrary.
Tynan's left-wing politics and lifestyle made him something of a poster boy for Sixties Radical Chic/Champagne Socialism in London. He suffered a notable defeat in the National's internal battles over his support for the Rolf Hochhuth play Soldiers, a controversial work highly critical of Winston Churchill, whose production at the National Theatre was eventually cancelled.
Meanwhile, Tynan's first marriage deteriorated to the point where he was living apart from Dundy, and they finally divorced in May 1964.[5] In December 1962 he had met Kathleen Halton, the daughter of famed wartime CBC correspondent Matthew Halton and sister of contemporary CBC journalist David Halton. Tynan convinced her to leave her husband and live with him.[1] On June 30, 1967, before a New York Justice of the Peace, he married a 6 month pregnant Halton, with Marlene Dietrich as witness. During the ceremony, Dietrich backed towards some doors to close them; the judge interrupted his oration, and without change in tone or pace said: "And do you, Kenneth, take Kathleen for your lawful-wedded--I wouldn't stand with your ass to an open door in this office lady--wife to have and to hold?"[6]
Halton gave up her career to support Tynan politically and socially. Her writing fell by the wayside during these years as the Tynan home became something of a focus for left-wing personalities in London.
An erotic revue which Tynan co-ordinated and partially wrote, called Oh! Calcutta!, debuted in 1969 and became one of the most successful theatre hits of all time. It included scenes written by various authors, including Samuel Beckett, John Lennon, and Edna O'Brien, as well as music, and featured frequent nudity. Tynan was a poor businessman, however, and the contracts he signed for the show brought him in only $250,000 out of the many millions it earned.[1]
In 1971, Tynan co-wrote with Roman Polanski the script of an unusually grim and violent screen adaptation of Macbeth. In that same year he returned to his childhood habit of keeping a journal, detailing his last few months at the Royal National Theatre, which he finally left at the end of 1973 after being out-manoeuvred by the incoming Peter Hall.
In the mid-1970s he made various failed efforts to explore serious sexual themes. He researched and wrote half a book on Wilhelm Reich. His attempts to compile an anthology of masturbation fantasies foundered after being rebuffed by Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett and others, and he couldn't raise enough money to finance a film about a sexual triangle. Sexual obsession and physical debility marked his last years, according to Johnson.[1]
His diaries, which he continued until the end of his life, are a mixture of self-examination and gossip; frequently hilarious and passionate, filled with wisdom and occasional folly, they reflect a growing sense of disappointment. Tynan moved with his family to California in 1976, in hopes of easing his emphysema and to write a series of lengthy articles for The New Yorker.
As his second wife found success as a screenwriter and author,[7] they had an uneasy relationship for the last few years. This marriage produced two children: Matthew, named for Kathleen's father, and Roxana. His second marriage began falling apart, largely because of "Tynan's insistence on total sexual latitude for himself, fidelity for his wife". He formed a relationship with a woman to enact sado-masochistic fantasies, sometimes involving both of them cross-dressing, sometimes hiring prostitutes as "extras" in elaborate scenes. He told his wife he intended to continue with the sessions weekly "although all common sense and reason and kindness and even camaraderie are against it. ... It is my choice, my thing, my need ... It is fairly comic and slightly nasty. But it is shaking me like an infection and I cannot do anything but be shaken until the fit has passed."[8]
Tynan died in Santa Monica, California, of pulmonary emphysema, aged 53. He was buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.
Tynan's influence on the theatre scene (particularly in London) was great, though his criticisms were often controversial and stinging. Many actors were frightened of incurring his wrath. Nevertheless, he deserves part of the credit for the theatrical revolution of the mid-1950s.
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