Sacred Monsters No. 1: Kenneth Tynan.

Monday 24 September 2001
The Guardian 

Tynan's gift was to make criticism glamorous and sexy Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington recalls an exceptional talent  No one, they say, ever erected a statue to a critic. But Kenneth Tynan has bequeathed something even larger to posterity: a legendary life. This year has already seen the publication of a revelatory memoir, Life Itself, by his first wife, Elaine Dundy. The Tynan Diaries are imminent. And, as a prelude, we have an extraordinary last interview by Ann Louise Bardach. As a result I suspect a certain image of Tynan will prevail: the spanker, the star-fucker, the sexual obsessive, the suave and ultimately ailing hedonist. He comes to seem like a Marlovian over-reacher who was finally the victim of both emphysema and his own fixations. The danger is that we shall soon forget the very thing that made him famous: his ability to write about the theatre with a voluptuous commitment. Most dramatic criticism is as ephemeral as the work it describes. Very little survives as literature. Hazlitt's essays on Kean and Kemble have a vivid, bloodshot urgency. Shaw's Our Theatres in the Nineties memorably demolishes Irving and paves the way for Ibsen. Agate wrote about great actors with gusto and allusive wit. To that select list one has to add Tynan, who not only had the gift for pinning down a performance but also, as both critic and National Theatre literary manager, helped redefine British

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