Word: tynan
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...informed Englishman, Tynan can see the American stage more steadily and wholly than nearly any American. "Due to the nature of Broadway--the blockbuster mystique, you know, it's got to be big and bangy," he detects "a tendency to look for the Great American Play all the time ... I think there's a danger that the more temperate drama might be washed out of sight in favor of a play like Niagara, that indunates you... I think the chief danger is the acceptance of excitement for excitement's sake...
...poetic in its effect... But now that Kazan is beginning to impose on realistic plays like Sweet Bird and Cat [on a Hot Tin Roof] an operatic style, I think it's dangerous and forced." The mainstream of American drama ("I hate to use phrases like 'mainstream,'" says Tynan) has to do with "observable reality. I think--let's be frank--that Kazan has moved too far away from that without the moral or social realities that are necessary to sustain it. Even in a play like Our Town ... the performances are realistic, and the dialogue is, and that...
...English stage, "The only thing that can be said for our movement in England is that it's not a one-man band." Only John Osborne, Tynan thinks, can rank with Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill. The centers of the English movement are the Royal Court Theatre near the West End, where Osborne was discovered, and the Theatre Workshop in East London, which produced Brendan Behan. "And the great thing about it," he says, "is that it is being supported by young people." The plays of this new group are being largely written, directed, and watched by people under...
When asked about verse drama, Tynan replied with a vigorous defense of prose. He recalled a remark of his that T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry, the leaders of the back-to-verse movement, reminded him of "two very energetic swimming instructors giving lessons in an empty pool.... I think, when the whole zeitgeist is toward prose, when prose has so recently been made respectable (nobody dreamed of writing a serious play in prose before 1870), when we're learning so rapidly about the possibilities of prose ... I just cannot go along with people, like Eliot, who say that there...
...course of an hour between lunch at the Riesmans' and punch with the populace in the Winthrop House Senior Common Room, Tynan ranged, on request, all over the theatrical map. Discussing playwrights unjustly neglected on the commercial stage, he nominated Brecht first of all, added Ibsen, Pirandello and Wedekind, and commented that "Giraudoux has been not neglected, but so often misinterpreted that it's worse than neglect." Jean Genet to Tynan is "a natural, who shouldn't be imitated... He's a bad model but an interesting artist"; Eugene Ionesco is "bright as a button...