Word: tynan
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...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...
What is does produce, in Thurber's case, is the most tedious sort of ramblings about his travels, his finances, and--in elaborate, unsparing detail--his failing eyesight. The editors identify "the Thurber Circle" as Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan Kenneth Tynan, and a few other literary buddies, but the letters make it clear that the circle that preoccupied Thurber was his right retina. An entire section of the book is devoted to Thurber's correspondence with his opthalmologist, in which he generally has this kind of thing...