Word: tynan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Actor, Laurence Olivier, came out in Britain in October and will be published in the U.S. next month (Simon & Schuster; $16.95). Sometimes embarrassingly frank, other times disappointingly discreet, it is, from beginning to end, always Olivier. He turned down would-be collaborators, like the late Critic Kenneth Tynan, and began work with a ghost. But after talking into a tape recorder for 30 or 40 hours, he took charge, as he usually does, and wrote everything himself. Now, on this chilly fall day, he has come in from the country to talk about his life and what he calls...
...late Kenneth Tynan, as dazzling a critic as recent years have seen, came to believe that "the two parts of Henry IV are the twin summits of Shakespeare's achievement. Line-hungry actors have led us always to the tragedies, where a single soul is spotlit and its agony explored; but these private torments dwindle beside the Henries, great public plays in which a whole nation is under scrutiny and on trial...
...none is bad. I could sit for hours and listen entranced to such cataloguing as: 'Of prisoners, Hotspur took/Mordake the Earl of Fife, and eldest son/To beaten Douglas; and the Earl of Athol,/Of Murray, Angus and Menteith.'" I doubt that there are many who would agree with Tynan, and I'm sure precious few would echo Agate...
...both Tynan and Agate were Britons-and we are Americans. Director Coe, who is English himself, had to make numerous decisions about how best to present I Henry IV at Stratford-on-Housatonic rather Stratford-on-Avon. In his printed credo, Coe announces as his goal to "realize, to as great a degree as possible, the playwright's original intention." Fine, but Coe has proceeded to depart from his promise in several ways...
Director Trevor Nunn, who can thread the needle's eye of nuance and possesses a searching eye for detail, has set the play in what the late Kenneth Tynan called "a timeless Edwardia." Helena, a kind of lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Rossillion (Peggy Ashcroft), burns with love for "a bright particular star," the countess's son Bertram. A physician's daughter, Helena follows Bertram to the Court of France and cures the mortally ill King (John Franklyn-Robbins...