British theatre's bad boy still hogs the limelight

Britain's sharpest drama critic is still taking curtain calls 20 years after he died, writes BOYD TONKIN.

Not long after he left Oxford in 1948, Kenneth Tynan joined a sort of graduate club whose members plotted their entry into prestigious jobs. Once, a row broke out among these upwardly mobile conspirators about who came from the most modest background.

It sounds uncannily like Monty Python's ruthlessly humble Four Yorkshiremen. John Wain (not yet a novelist) opened with a feeble bid: the son of a mere provincial dentist, he didn't count as proper posh.

Kingsley Amis retorted that his pater was just a minor civil-service pen-pusher.

Alan Brien (the future journalist) flourished his court card: his dad was an authentic prole, a fitter "who had never earned more than £2 10s in his life."

Then Kenneth Peacock Tynan, who had already picked up a lifelong habit of having the last word, played his ace. Through his stammer, the gilded youth from Birmingham proclaimed, "No, no, no. I am lower, because I'm a b-b-bastard."

Plenty of Tynan's many enemies, in the British theatre and beyond, would have heartily agreed - in the non-genealogical sense.

His parents' tale comes straight out of some muck-and-brass novel of the 20s. Ken's sweet and lonely laundress mother, Rose, came from Irish Protestant stock. Sir Peter Peacock, his upstanding magnate of a dad, kept an "official" family up in Warrington, where he served six times as the town's utterly respectable mayor.

At weekends, Peter would motor down to Birmingham to stay with Rose. They would wonder how to satisfy the prodigiously talented boy who received 100 books for Christmas when he was 9 years old.

The most stylish and acerbic of postwar critics, and the guerrilla chief of 60s libertinism, would nurture his outsider status like some kind of sacred wound.

To Kathleen Tynan, his second wife, who wrote one of the shrewdest biographies a widow has ever devoted to a husband, Ken "paid for the phenomenal mismanagement of this relatively simple issue in complex and diverse ways ... The past both crippled and animated him, forced him on to a tightrope of insecurity without which his life might have had less flavour. Despite and because of the handicap he soared. Where might he have flown had he been free?"

No critic has ever hogged so much limelight. Now, 20 years after his agonising death from smoking-induced emphysema, Kenneth Tynan is still taking posthumous curtain calls. The New Yorker magazine has begun to print extracts from the journals that he kept through his last decade, 1970-80 - a taster of the book to be published next year.

We learn that Vivien Leigh (whose acting Tynan loathed) tried to seduce him while he stayed with her and Laurence Olivier (who addressed his letters to "My dearest Kenny"). Unaroused, Tynan instead helps Leigh to don Sybil Thorndike's chain-mail armour from Saint Joan.

They rejoin the dinner guests, and Leigh's mother scolds: "Now, Miss, that's quite enough of that. You and your manners." So Ken takes his turn in "the bloody corselet" and "conversation continues, nobody referring to the fact that I am dressed as the Maid of Orleans."

Many entries read as if Alan Bennett and Gore Vidal had joined forces for some delirious satire on luvvie follies.

Marlene Dietrich claims to have slept with JFK - just a lazy quickie, of course. "I'm an old lady ... I'd like to sleep with the President, sure, but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to be on top!"

At Tony Richardson's St Tropez villa, John Gielgud asks Tynan about an American thriller.

"KT: 'It's about a masochistic convict who keeps getting himself imprisoned because he likes being sucked off by sadistic Negro murderers.'

"JG: 'Well, you can't quarrel with that."'

But fillet out the laugh-lines and it sounds extremely sad. The jottings come from the tiring mind (and ailing body) of an exhausted roue, jaded in his sensual and intellectual appetites.

His pyrotechnic, agenda-setting theatre criticism for the Observer in the era of Angry Young Men had never satisfied Tynan. As one of his best-known aphorisms puts it, "A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car."

For him, driving the sleek but elderly sedan of British drama down a more exciting road meant association with the fledgling National Theatre under Olivier. From 1963 to 1969, Tynan served, with remarkable diligence, as the NT's literary manager. At first, Olivier merely wished to neuter the spraying tomcat of Fleet St. "How shall we slaughter the little bastard?" he asked his then wife, Joan Plowright.

The job meant a comfy cage and a bitten tongue. The national disgrace who first said the F word on television (on November 13, 1965) buckled down to hard work as a dutiful arts bureaucrat.

To a large degree, his commitment paid off. He discovered Tom Stoppard and helped steer the National into a fruitful phase in the 70s with such legendary productions as Long Day's Journey into Night, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Equus, Jumpers and The Party.

Soon, the Peter Hall regime began (another enemy) and Tynan went into exile. By then, his slide into world-weary inertia was gathering pace.

The success of his cheesy erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! in 1969 had confirmed Tynan as the languid guru of sexual liberation. This was rather an odd accolade for someone whose own private fantasies (as both his wives discovered, to their chagrin) involved old-fashioned and ritualistic sado-masochistic scenes. He later had a long, intermittent affair with a young actress - called "Nicole" in the biography and journals - whose tastes exactly matched his own.

By now rich, bored and ill, Tynan frittered away endless torpid months in projects for tawdry "artistic" blue movies with Roman Polanski.

The journal extracts drip with middle-aged narcissism and listless anomie.

What happened to the sharp critic, whose writing is collected in out-of-print gems such as A View of the English Stage, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping and Tynan Right and Left? Only a late-70s swansong in Los Angeles released the old magic, with long, strong essays on "high-definition" artists such as his old friend Dietrich, and the rediscovered Louise Brooks.

Yet the great talker had by then begun, quite literally, to run out of puff, suffocating day by day. The end came, too slowly, in Los Angeles.

Why should Tynan matter now, beyond those feline but remote reviews and all the ageing showbiz scuttlebutt?

For a start, his high ideal of a true National Theatre never came to pass. In Tynan's heyday, the National had more ambitious goals than it ever did once ensconced in the South Bank.

As critic and propagandist, he deployed a laser-sharp mockery to torch the walls of smugness and snobbery that in the 50s still girdled so many British institutions.

He had all the mischief, wit and panache of his hero, Muhammad Ali, in his heyday. After watching Ali taunt George Foreman, Tynan purrs: "He is not only skilled, graceful, arrogant and flamboyant; he is a brilliant strategist and enormously tough ... What a bitch he is, what a vain, pugnacious bitch!"

It might have been an epitaph for his own best years.

In the theatre, those years were filled with assaults on "Loamshire" - the dead space of cliche and convention where so much West End drama still unfolded.

"We need plays about cabmen and demi-gods, plays about warriors, politicians and grocers," Tynan thundered. "I care not, so Loamshire be invaded and subdued."

The Birmingham bastard delighted in creative destruction. He was less adept at building from the rubble, although no one could say he didn't try.

And the witty man became a cause of wit in others. He encouraged conspicuous intelligence - still a serious British misdemeanour.

Tynan "wanted you to be clever," Marina Warner recalled. "He created an atmosphere where you didn't want to fall short. You always wanted to glitter and sparkle."

Yet "glitter and sparkle" can fade fast into something dull and slick. Tynan helped yank the smart theatre away from its petrified high-bourgeois roots, and lash it to the gaudy cart of counter-culture. In the end, that bandwagon stopped, not in some avant-garde Utopia, but amid the big-money nightmare of stunt, sleaze and spectacle.

Consider the low-lit apparition of Jerry Hall, briefly naked in The Graduate. So many of Tynan's later schemes point to just such a headline-grabbing fusion of drama and glamour.

Would he admire the result? My hunch is that he would be delighted and appalled - and want the lights turned up a bit.

- INDEPENDENT