Who is kenneth tynan

Some sense of proportion was restored only when Emrys Hughes--rightly renowned as the House's jester--offered an amendment saying that Carleton Greene should not go unless every member of Her Majesty's forces who had used the word in the last five years was discharged, too.

Tynan's function as a critic has been to shock, to outrage, to stimulate. The tendency was evident early. At King Edward VI School in Birmingham, the headmaster tried to interest the boys in civics by holding a mock election. Tynan, then 15 years old, was to be the Independent candidate and his manifesto, pinned to the school bulletin board, advocated the repeal of the laws governing homosexuality and abortion.

The headmaster said that Tynan must withdraw the manifesto. Tynan held a protest meeting in the lavatories. The head sent for him and asked him to withdraw from the election. Tynan handed in his resignation and that of the three other candidates. Tynan was born in Birmingham, on April 2, , the illegitimate son of a minor store tycoon and a Lancashire girl of Irish parentage whose surname was Tynan.

His father, Sir Peter Peacock, had begun as a 5-shilling-a-week office boy, his mother's family had been in domestic service. They met at a whist party in the Lancashire town of Warrington, where the father was mayor, and moved to Birmingham to avoid scandal. Sir Peter was 55 when Tynan was born, and died, in , aged He wore a frock coat, voted Liberal, was a strong Methodist and a devout patriot. He had no interest in the theater. Sir Peter left? It was his mother who first took Tynan to the theater and it quickly enslaved him.

He saw Donald Wolfit in "Macbeth" in "and was scared to death for days after. I wanted to give a permanent form to something evanescent. That, a local actor told him, was all very well, but could he review it in an hour flat, as professional critics must?

Tynan put a watch in front of him and wrote the review inside the time. Soon his apprentice work had engaged the attention of James Agate, then the magisterial critic of The Sunday Times of London, who printed extracts from their correspondence in his autobiographical volumes, "Ego Eight" and "Ego Nine. In other words, here is a great dramatic critic in the making.

Tynan invited Agate down to Birmingham. In the taxi from the station Agate, wearing his sporty hat and carrying his usual silver-knobbed cane, placed his hand on Tynan's knee.

Agate could be forgiven his misapprehension. When Tynan went up to Oxford in October, , he habitually wore a purple doeskin suit with a gold satin shirt. He was woefully emaciated, just over six feet tall, and his wild thatch of hair looked as if it had been used to pack bottles of champagne.

He was burned in effigy by a gang of football thugs and only escaped debugging by sinking to the ground with the histrionic cry of "Christ, my hip, it's gone again! But this was indisputably Tynan's Oxford. When he spoke in the Union Society it was packed as only one other undergraduate, Hillaire Belloc, had ever filled it. He ended one speech on a comma. Another night he persuaded the whole house to leap to its feet and cry, "I am big and strong and powerful.

He was equally comic as a cabaret turn and his celebrated impersonation of the ballet dancer, Sir Robert Helpman, caused his undergraduate audience to fall out of their seats. Later, he was auditioned for the Windmill Theater but turned down because, said Vivian Van Damm, his act was too queer.

No, not normal. He was a marvelous boy: when he left Oxford in he had been president of the Experimental Theater Club, editor of the student magazine Cherwell and secretary of the Union. He had produced five plays, acted in half a dozen more, and played Fear in the "Masque of Hope," presented for Princess Elizabeth. He had also thrown parties for the Old Vic company, the cast of "Anna Lucasta" and Gertrude Lawrence, and one marking his 21st birthday for guests on a Thames pleasure steamer.

To his great regret, he just failed to get a first-class degree in English, but fell under the spell of the late C. Lewis, who taught him and whose memory he still reveres. The greatest single influence on his life, though, has been Orson Welles: "my Big Daddy figure. My only excuse is that of Winifred in Webster's play, 'May it please the court, I am but a young thing, and was drawn arnic-varsic into the business.

Alec Guinness read the book and subsequently dreamed that he had seen Tynan playing the Player King in "Hamlet. Tynan was not keen. I'm as skinny as a willow and have a voice of tin. In the end Guinness talked him into it. The first night was a fiasco. The electricians got four or five cues behind so that the ghost scene was played in blinding light. Somebody had hit on the abysmal notion of kitting the Player King out with a plastic fluorescent ear into which the poison was to be poured.

The critics massacred it. Tynan, in a masterly letter to the editor, conceded that it had not been a great performance, but claimed that it was not at church-hall level: "I neither waved to my friends in the audience nor walked through the scenery. He stayed two years and wrote some of the most iridescent but destructive dramatic criticism ever penned.

Of Anna Neagle in "The Glorious Days," for example, he said that she shook her voice at the audience "like a tiny fist. This put Tynan at the top of his profession.

But what, I asked him at the time, was he going to do for the next 50 years? One of the good things that can happen is an invitation from The New Yorker; Tynan joined it in and stayed for two theater seasons. At any social gathering where theater people were present, Richard Watts of The New York Post recalls, "there was a sure way for a lonely guest to attract attention. All he had to do was to say loudly, 'Kenneth Tynan' and excited men and women would start arguing violently.

Though Tynan could be brutal to mediocrity, he persuaded the Critics' Circle to make "Raisin in the Sun" the prize play of the season, and played a key part in making a success of "The Connection. Producer David Merrick threatened to ban him from his theaters and an irate actress sent him a note: "Dear Ken: Go home and go to hell.

Or go to hell, which is your home. He was also in political trouble. In May, , he was subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security subcommittee and questioned about his views on Cuba and other matters.

Then if they think the witness is worth it, they have a public session to which the press is invited. In my case, although Senator Dodd from Connecticut was clearly convinced that I was a Communist agent, they didn't bother to take it any further. This political involvement springs from Tynan's conviction that drama is a branch of sociology. I suspected that all really first-rate drama was about great men and dying and mourning; beyond that nothing For me, in short, drama was apart from life instead of a part of it.

This is still his position. I was the perfect audience for him. I am probably the only convert he ever made. Tynan has traveled widely behind the Iron Curtain, admires much of the theater in satellite countries but has never, pace Senator Dodd, been a Communist. In Russia you have a political revolution with a Victorian family hierarchy imposed on it. He had long courted controversy, and even at his school debating society he put forward what were for the time ultra-progressive views in an effort to get a reaction, such as calling for the abolition of laws outlawing homosexuality and abortion.

Later, he would unsuccessfully try to publish an anthology of masturbatory literature. This factoid is often repeated, but it appears that Tynan was pipped to the post nine years earlier by Irish playwright Brendan Behan.

On Panorama in June , Behan had dropped the F-bomb but hardly anyone noticed, as Behan was — as was his wont — blind drunk. Still, although Tynan may not have been the first, his use of the four-letter word in on the late-night show BBC-3 over thirty years before the channel of that name would be launched was the one that sparked the media firestorm.

Tynan, a lifelong devotee of sadomasochism, would doubtless have enjoyed such a punishment. Tynan organised the comedy revue Oh! Born Kenneth Peacock Tynan in Birmingham, England on April 2, , the illegitimate son of Sir Peter Peacock, the former mayor of Warrington, who was leading a double life with his mistress and assumed the name of Tynan. His son did not find out the truth until his father's death in While at Oxford, he acted and produced play and won a reputation as a brilliant pubic speaker at the Oxford Union.

He also edited and contributed to college magazines. He wasted no time in establishing a reputation for himself of recklessness, boldness, and iconoclasm. He moved over to The Observer in , and it there that he played a key role in the revolution of the London theater that began in the theater season, with the debut of John Osborne 's watershed play Look Back in Anger But it was Osbourne's play that, overnight, made the English theater that immediately preceded it old-fashioned and out-of- date, making such popular playwrights Terence Rattigan seem almost obsolete.

From his pulpit at The Observer, Tynan espoused the theatrical realism of the group of playwrights that became known as The Angry Young Men and whose works were derided by the proponents of a more genteel theater as "kitchen sink drama".

Laurence Olivier, keen to not let fashion slip by him and become a living relic himself, became a convert to The Angry Young Man school, partly through Tynan's criticism and partly through the praise of Arthur Miller , with whom he had seen "Look Back in Anger" at the theater.

Olivier approached Osbourne, who wrote "The Entertainer" -- one of Olivier's greatest roles -- for the theatrical knight. In , when Olivier was named artistic director at the state-subsidized National Theatre, he appointed Tynan dramaturg, or literary adviser.

Tynan had recommended himself for the job. After the appointment, Tynan left The Observer for the National Theatre, where he established an international reputation for himself. He had been contributing pieces to The New Yorker since , but during the '60s, he became one of the most influential people working in the English-language theater, welcomed on both sides of The Pond. In many ways, Tynan was at the right place at the right time.

He wanted to overturn censorship and extend the boundaries of speech, and the s were a propitious time for iconoclasts. He has the distinction of being the first person to use the "f"-word on English television, on a November 13, , BBC broadcast of a live TV debate.