Word: tynan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...looks remarkably like nothing much. He is rather short and shapeless, with milk-bottle shoulders, chubby hands and a prosperous waistline. He is balding, jug-eared, and his pale phiz is blotched with pale freckles and pale blue eyes. His usual expression is an unemphatic blank. Critic Kenneth Tynan once mused that "the number of false arrests following the circulation of his description would break all records...
...gestures are pushed aside like a cocoon, and a new existence emerges. Indeed, Alec's essential gift is not for creating characters, but existences. His people are all somehow like children, playing alone in corners, a life unto themselves. "His is the art of public solitude," says Critic Tynan. "He can seem unobserved...
...next thing I could hear," said Logue later, "was Wilson shouting 'Stand up, Logue, stand up, Logue,' in the true, lower-middle-class English fashion." Wilson flailed wildly at Tynan. "You deliberately tried to sabotage the play," he shouted. "I'll stamp you out, Tynan. Literature isn't big enough for both...
Just as the bartender moved in to break it up, Tynan leveled a long finger at Wilson. "There's your supposed leader, your younger generation," he cried. "He's a dictator. He reminds me of the Oswald Mosley meetings before the war." "Terrific!" roared John Osborne. "A row like this is just what I've been looking for." Explained Logue later: "I objected to the philosophical statement, implied in every line, that we must suffer, that attempts to check, alter, reform, change our sufferings are impudence...
Next day the critics panned The Tenth Chance. "Sadistic spinach," said Tynan in his column in the Sunday Observer...