Word: tynan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the stage was his only world, Kenneth Tynan dominated it as no drama critic since George Bernard Shaw had. When, sometime in the 1960s, the wide world was turned into a stage for celebrity posturings, the critic recast himself as a potential star, offering himself as an international social critic and sexual reformer. And became just another face in a crowd grotesquely clamoring for attention. The life his second wife, Kathleen, recounts in her uncompromising and ultimately harrowing biography-memoir becomes the record of a befuddled search for the fulfillment of youth's inordinate promise, and for the graceful...
...high seriousness, and of the cobwebbed comic conventions that served only a low commercial cunning. His eloquent partisanship opened the doors not just for a new moral consciousness but for fresh forms of theatrical literacy, like Tom Stoppard's bedazzling overstatements and Harold Pinter's hypnotic understatements. At Tynan's memorial service in 1980, the former turned to the critic's children and said, "For those of us who shared his time, your father was part of the luck...
...Tynan himself heedlessly outraced that luck. Affecting purple jackets and leopard-spot trousers, courting the social and cultural glitterati, restlessly glamour-traveling the world, he made it clear from the start that the critic's customary place as a dim lurker in the shadows was not for him. A bourgeoise childhood (he was the bastard son of a merchant who achieved knighthood) in provincial Birmingham taught him his lifelong horror of grayness. His legendary Oxford career as controversialist, actor, debater, director, dandy and libertine imbued him with his tropism toward fame's warming light. Indeed, it might be argued that...
...well-thought-out (or at least well-rationalized) principle was operative too. Tynan reserved his deepest regard for what he called "high- definition performers," the elite who communicate the essence of their talents "with economy, grace, no apparent effort and absolute hard-edged clarity of outline." That description perfectly fits his reviews. He was, in them, a man doing turns on a high wire, the light refracting off his sequined prose, half blinding readers already dazed by his fearlessly leaping judgments...
...Gallo, Brigid O' Hara- Forster, Victoria Sales (Department Heads); Audrey Ball, Bernard Baumohl, Peggy T. Berman, Val Castronovo, Nancy McD. Chase, Oscar Chiang, Georgia Harbison, Michael P. Harris, Anne Hopkins, Naushad S. Mehta, Nancy Newman, Jeanne- Marie North, Susan M. Reed, Elizabeth Rudulph, Alain L. ; Sanders, Zona Sparks, William Tynan, Susanne Washburn (Senior Staff); Wilmer Ames Jr., David Bjerklie, Elizabeth L. Bland, Kathleen Brady, Robert I. Burger, Wendy Cole, Tom Curry, Nelida Gonzalez Cutler, Sally B. Donnelly, Andrea Dorfman, David Ellis, Kathryn Jackson Fallon, Mary McC. Fernandez, Cassie T. Furgurson, John E. Gallagher, Nancy R. Gibbs, Lois Gilman, Edward...