Tynan

Synopsis

Based on the diaries of the infamous theatre critic and writer Kenneth Tynan. Written over the last ten years of Tynan's life, these painfully honest and revealing diaries create a portrait of one of the most interesting and complex men of our time. Literary Manager of the National Theatre under Olivier, dominant theatre critic, journalist, impresario of Oh! Calcutta!, Kenneth Tynan was a profound, original and witty observer of his world. And never was he more ruthless than when he turned his sights upon himself. Suitable for ages 15+

Our Review:

22 February 2005

After the astonishingly agile, multi-character virtuosity of Mark Setlock, the American actor who recently played on this same Arts Theatre stage in the Whatsonstage.com Award-winning Fully Committed, Corin Redgrave’s solo turn as Tynan – the late, great theatre critic of the 1950s, literary adviser to Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre in the 1960s and sometime theatrical producer – is an altogether more sedentary, but far from sedate, affair.

Seated centre stage in a wood office chair throughout, Redgrave speaks Kenneth Tynan’s own words, taken from the diaries he began in 1971, aged 43, that traced his decline and fall over the next nine years until his death in 1980.

Like the recent diaries of Simon Gray and the writing of Jeffrey Bernard (famously brought to the stage in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell), there’s something both morbidly fascinating and compulsive about a character who is simultaneously so self-destructive and ye...

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Latest User Review

81.158.234.177) - 1 March 2005:

Redgrave is not Tynan but gives an enthralling soliloquy of wry anecdotes from a quirky sexually deviant celebrity theatre critic. More backstage gossip would be welcome but there's lashings, literally, of sexual activity. Several blue-haired ladies oooh'd and aaah'd at stuff they obviously hadn't experienced or even heard of , some perhaps in envy. Lustful laughs throughout ( but so many of this theatre's seats need repair )....

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