Word: tynan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...classics by Guinness, Olivier and Gielgud. Taken singly, the plays that London offered were often first-rate achievements by first-rate actors and directors. Taken together, there was something missing, an ennui in the audience and on the stage itself. "Apart from revivals and imports," complained Critic Kenneth Tynan in 1954, "there is nothing in the London theater that one dares discuss with an intelligent man for five minutes." Looking back, Director Peter Brook says that "the role of the theater based on escape was finished and had to be replaced by a theater based on what...
...approval, permits sexual play or sexual passion to be described in lavish detail, in four-letter as well as polysyllabic words, in fiction. But a certain reticence and circumlocution, for obvious reasons, is still demanded in the public prints, on radio and on television. Last week British Critic Kenneth Tynan, who doubles as literary director of Britain's National Theater, decided to test that convention and found it still intact...
...Tynan might be right. Certainly millions of English-speaking people use it every day as verb, noun and adjective, as an expletive, an oath, and even a term of endearment. But, as Tynan quickly learned from the uproar that followed his pronouncement, there is still a considerable gap between private usage and public sensibility. The novel may reflect life, but life does not yet completely imitate fiction...
...well past prime time, where the question of sexual explicitness in the theater was under discussion. With bland insouciance, the moderator asked: "Would you go so far as to allow a play to be put on at the National Theater in which sexual intercourse took place on the stage?" Tynan took a deep breath, peered soberly into the camera, and said: "Certainly." Then, using the most familiar English four-letter colloquialism for the act of love, he allowed that there are "very few rational people in this world to whom the word is particularly revolting...
Half a Sixpence, a musical adapted from H. G. Wells's novel Kipps, comes from that nostalgic era that Kenneth Tynan once called "timeless Edwardia" ?a period now thought to have been simple, stalwart, gracious, leisurely, and completely immune to the fretful complexities of modern life...