Кеннет Тинан: Театр сыншысы және жазушының өмірі мен шығармашылығы

English theatre critic, literary manager and writer (1927–1980)

Kenneth Peacock Tynan (2 April 1927 – 26 July 1980) was an English theatre critic and writer. Initially making his mark as a critic at The Observer, he praised John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and encouraged the emerging wave of British theatrical talent. In 1963 Tynan was appointed the new National Theatre Company's literary manager. An opponent of theatre censorship, he is thought to have been the first person to say "fuck" on British television, during a live 1965 broadcast. Later in life he settled in California, where he resumed his writing career.

Tynan was born in Birmingham, England, to Letitia Rose Tynan and (as he was led to believe) "Peter Tynan" (see below). Tynan had a stammer that was more pronounced as a child. He also possessed early on a high degree of articulate intelligence. By the age of six, he was already keeping a diary. At King Edward's School, Birmingham, he was a brilliant student of whom one of his masters said: "He was the only boy I could never teach anything." He played the lead, Doctor Parpalaid, in an English translation of Jules Romains's farce Knock. While at school, Tynan began smoking, which became a lifelong habit. Tynan was twelve at the outbreak of the Second World War. At thirteen, he was nearly killed when a parachute landmine destroyed the houses on the other side of the Birmingham street where the Tynans lived, killing the inhabitants. He adopted opinions then deemed outrageous. During school debates, he advocated repealing laws against homosexuality and abortion. During a school debate on the motion "This House Thinks the Present Generation Has Lost the Ability to Entertain Itself", Tynan gave a speech on the pleasures of masturbation. By the time the war ended, he had gained a scholarship to Oxford University.

At Magdalen College, Oxford, Tynan lived flamboyantly but was already beginning to suffer from the effects of his heavy smoking. The writer Paul Johnson, "an awestruck freshman witness to his arrival at the Magdalen lodge", described Tynan as a "tall, beautiful, epicene youth, with pale yellow locks, Beardsley cheekbones, fashionable stammer, plum coloured suit, lavender tie and ruby signet ring." According to Johnson, most students were "struck speechless" by Tynan's extravagant style. Disliked by some, Tynan was an intellectual and social leader among Oxford undergraduates, often made a splash ("during the whole of his time there he was easily the most talked of person in the city"), had groupies ("a court of young women and admiring dons"), and gave sensational parties sometimes attended by London entertainment celebrities, Johnson wrote. a former mayor of Warrington, who had been leading a double life for more than 20 years, and who had a wife and another family in Warrington. Tynan's mother was obliged to return Sir Peter's body to his wife and family in Warrington for burial. Tynan's discovery of his father's deception (and his mother's collusion) severely damaged his ability to trust others. When Tynan was called up for National Service, he put on an act of appearing outrageously camp, including wearing a floppy hat, velvet coat, painted fingernails and a great deal of Yardley scent. Perhaps partly as a result, he was rejected as "medically unfit" for service.

On 25 January 1951, Tynan married the American author Elaine Dundy after a three month romance. The following year, their daughter, Tracy (born 12 May 1952, Westminster, London), was named after the character in The Philadelphia Story, Tracy Lord, played by Katharine Hepburn. Subsequently Hepburn was asked to be godmother, which she accepted. Tynan's career took off in 1952 when he was hired as a theatre critic for the London Evening Standard. According to Johnson, Tynan "quickly established himself as the most audacious literary journalist in London. His motto was: 'Write heresy, pure heresy.' He pinned to his desk the exhilarating slogan: 'Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds. The theatre historian Dan Rebellato asserts: "it is clear that he is set on confronting his readership, not speaking for them". "He became a power in the London theatre, which regarded him with awe, fear and hatred", Johnson wrote. Tynan commissioned a film adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies from Nigel Kneale, but Ealing Studios closed in 1959 before it could be produced. From 1958 to 1960, Tynan became known in the United States by contributing "some superb reviews" to The New Yorker. Johnson wrote that "women seem to have objected less to his sadism, which took only a mild form, than to his vanity and authoritarianism. [ ] He treated women as possessions. [ ] Tynan, while reserving the unqualified right to be unfaithful himself, expected loyalty from his spouse." On one occasion, he returned from a meeting with his mistress to find a naked man in the kitchen with his wife. He threw the man's clothes down a lift shaft.—although at least three prior claims have been asserted: Brendan Behan on Panorama in 1956 (although his drunken slurring was not understood); an anonymous man who painted the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the River Lagan in Belfast, who in 1959 told Ulster TV's magazine show, Roundabout, that his job was "fucking boring"; Johnson later called Tynan's use of the word "his masterpiece of calculated self publicity", adding, "for a time it made him the most notorious man in the country". Private Eye joked that Tynan's stammer made it the first three syllable four letter word on British television. In response to public outcry, the BBC was forced to issue a formal apology. In the House of Commons, four censuring motions were signed by a total of 133 Labour and Conservative backbenchers. Mary Whitehouse, a frequent critic of the BBC over issues of "morals and decency", wrote a letter to the Queen, suggesting that Tynan should be reprimanded by having "his bottom spanked". The irony of Whitehouse's comment has been noted, given the later revelations of Tynan's fetish for flagellation. Tynan's use of the four letter word appears in a song by comedian Billy Connolly in his song "Four Letter Word". The controversy was part of a larger, longstanding aim of Tynan's "of breaking down linguistic inhibitions on the stage and in print. In 1960, "after much manoeuvring", Tynan got the four letter word into The Observer in an article about the Lady Chatterley trial. His organisation of Oh! Calcutta! in 1969 was another important victory in that campaign. In 1971, Tynan and Roman Polanski co wrote an unusually grim and violent screen adaptation of Macbeth. In that same year, he returned to his childhood habit of keeping a journal, detailing his last few months at the National Theatre Company, which he finally left at the end of 1973 after being outmanoeuvred by its new artistic director, Peter Hall. In the mid 1970s, Tynan made various failed efforts to explore serious sexual themes. He researched and wrote half a book on Wilhelm Reich. His attempts to compile an anthology of masturbation fantasies foundered after being rebuffed by Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett and others, and he couldn't raise enough money to finance a film about a sexual triangle. Sexual obsession and physical debility marked Tynan's last years, according to Johnson.

Tynan's first marriage deteriorated to the point where he was living apart from Dundy, and they finally divorced in May 1964. In December 1962, he had met Kathleen Halton, the daughter of wartime CBC correspondent Matthew Halton and sister of contemporary CBC journalist David Halton. Tynan convinced her to leave her husband and live with him. Tynan's second marriage began falling apart, largely because of his "insistence on total sexual latitude for himself, fidelity for his wife". He formed a relationship with a woman to enact sado masochistic fantasies, sometimes involving both of them cross dressing, sometimes hiring prostitutes as "extras" in elaborate scenes. Tynan told his wife that he intended to continue with the sessions weekly "although all common sense and reason and kindness and even camaraderie are against it. It is my choice, my thing, my need It is fairly comic and slightly nasty. But it is shaking me like an infection and I cannot do anything but be shaken until the fit has passed." The memoir of Tracy Tynan, his daughter from the marriage to Dundy, was published in 2016 in the United States. Wear and Tear: The Threads of My Life concerns her parents' tempestuous marriage, and Tynan's later experiences of them after the couple divorced.

On 26 July 1980, Tynan died in Santa Monica, California, of pulmonary emphysema, aged 53. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford. In 1994, the British Library acquired the Tynan Archive consisting of correspondence, manuscripts, National Theatre papers, and papers relating to Oh! Calcutta!.