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Kenneth Tynan

Kenneth Tynan Books

Critic

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“With their pride of controlled selfhood, their inner discipline, such players made us a little ashamed of our glad acceptance of democratic values. We had been content to think of our time as the age of the little man. By the light shed from these giant contrasts, we felt (but never, I am afraid, admitted) that ours was the age of the dwarf. Such adventures in uniqueness were rare beyond the stage door.”

ActorsPost WarEnglish TheatreHeroic Acting
Book:He That Plays the King: A View of the Theatre
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“I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair."”

WorldShouldHumansFactsUseLife IsCan DoHuman BeingsInfluenceTaughtEqualDespairWesternDoctrineLuxuryDestructiveFedsMortalityOverwhelmingLeisureContemplatingPrivilegedIndulgePlaywrightPointlessIndulge InAffluence
Author:Kenneth Tynan
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“Judge and prosecutor had hammered it home that Lady Chatterly was an immoral woman, that she had had sexual relations before marriage, that she had committed adultery under her husband's roof; as if these charges somehow disqualified her from participation in serious literature. Indeed, there were long periods of the trial during which an outsider might well have assumed that a divorce case was being heard.”

IfsWellsLongHomeMightLiteratureCasesHeardSeriousJudgingPeriodsHusbandRelationCommittedDivorceTrialsOutsidersRoofParticipationImmoralAdulteryProsecutorHammeredBefore MarriageCommitting Adultery
Author:Kenneth Tynan
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“In most writers, style is a welcome, an invitation, a letting down of the drawbridge between the artist and the world. Shaw had no time for such ruses. Unlike most of his countrymen, he abominated charm, which he regarded as evidence of chronic temperamental weakness.”

WorldArtistStyleWeaknessEvidenceWelcomeCharmInvitationsCountrymen
Book:Curtains: Selections from the Drama Criticism and Related Writings
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“All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad.”

MenWritingLittlesSpeakCuttingCommunicationMadCommunicateLocksAntisocial
Book:Curtains: Selections from the Drama Criticism and Related Writings
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“Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.”

WayHumansArtDifferentFactsCommonMankindSourceSpringDrawsChaosIdeologyDifferent WaysHuman ExperienceCoherence
Book:Curtains: Selections from the Drama Criticism and Related Writings
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