Word: tynan
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SHOW PEOPLE by Kenneth Tynan; Simon & Schuster; 317pages...
...evolution; yet the process of changing Homo erectus into Homo sedentarius is well under way. We sit; we watch; we listen. We sit, talk and read about what we have seen and heard. As a drama critic and former literary director of England's National Theater, Kenneth Peacock Tynan knows what keeps readers and audiences in their seats. He did, after all, conceive and produce Oh! Calcutta! Tynan can be glib, self-serving, tricky and loosely digressionary. But he is never dull. At 52, the graying provocateur describes himself as "a cricket-loving radical" and misses few opportunities...
...Tynan seems to move easily and confidently on both sides of the Atlantic. He should. In addition to many friends on the London stage, he has connections in New York and Los Angeles, where he has lived for the past two years. He is one of the few journalists who actually keep a daily journal, which he employs here as a film director might use jump cuts. He has the panache to handle the first person singular, although the effect can be cloying when he immodestly quotes himself: "Above all, there was the voice [Sir Ralph Richardson's], which...
...wrote in another context..." Elsewhere, after noting that he made last-minute cuts and transpositions in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, Tynan proudly quotes from one opening-night review: "As gay and original a farce as we have seen for years...
...Tynan pays his respects to criticism in shrewd analyses of Richardson's performances and brief exegeses of Stoppard's plays. But mainly the author aims to please both his subjects and his readers. He is dazzled by Stoppard's stylish pessimism and flashy wordplay, yet wisely blocks him from the company of Beckett, Nabokov and Oscar Wilde. Deftly, Tynan puts his judgment of Stoppard in the book's foreword: "A uniquely inventive playwright who has more than once been within hailing distance of greatness." The piece itself is an adulatory delight, especially a scene in which...