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Kenneth Tynan - Theatre Writings

Kenneth Tynan - Theatre Writings( )
Author: Tynan, Kenneth
Editor: Shellard, Dominic
Foreword by: Stoppard, Tom
ISBN:978-1-85459-050-3
Publication Date:Mar 2007
Publisher:Nick Hern Books, Limited
Book Format:Hardback
List Price:AUD $46.99
Book Description:

This volume, selected and edited by Tynan's biographer, Dominic Shellard, brings together the best of Tynan's theatre writing drawn from his twelve years as a theatre critic (1951-63). Included are ground-breaking reviews of plays by Arthur Miller, John Osborne, T.S.Eliot and Noel Coward, as well as articles on such topics as Broadway musicals, censorship, Brecht in Berlin and the National Theatre, where he was to be Olivier's right-hand man - thus ending his career as a critic. All of...
More Description

Book Details
Pages:320
Detailed Subjects: Performing Arts / Theater / History & Criticism
Literary Criticism / Drama
Physical Dimensions (W X L X H):16.535 x 24.054 x 2.184 cm
Book Weight:0.545 Kilograms
Author Biography
Tynan, Kenneth (Author)
When the National Theatre needed a last-minute substitute for a canceled production of As You Like It, Kenneth Tynan decided to stage Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a work by an unfamiliar author that had received discouraging notices from provincial critics at its Edinburgh Festival debut. Of course, the play, when it opened in April 1967, met with universal acclaim. In New York the next year, it was chosen best play by the Drama Critics Circle.

In such an unlikely way, Tom Stoppard came to light. Born in Czechoslovakia, a country he left (for Singapore) when he was an infant, he began his literary career as a journalist in Bristol, where play reviewing led to playwriting. After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard's reputation suffered through the production of a number of minor works, whose intellectual preoccupations were shrugged off by reviewers: Enter a Free Man (1968; "an adolescent twinge of a play," N.Y. Times), The Real Inspector Hound (1968; "lightweight," N.Y. Times), and After Magritte. But in the 1970s, the initial enthusiasms aroused by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were more than vindicated by the production of two full-length plays, Jumpers (1974) and the antiwar play Travesties (1975), whose immense verbal and theatrical inventiveness made them absolute successes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Stoppard's method from the start has been to contrive explanations for highly unlikely encounters---of objects (the ironing board, old lady, and bowler hat of After Magritte), characters (Joyce, Lenin, and Tzara in Travesties), and even plays (Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, The Importance of Being Earnest, Travesties, and The Real Thing, 1982). In the 1970s, Tynan called for Stoppard---as a Czech and as an artist---to engage himself politically. But although political subjects have since found their way into pieces from Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (1977) to Squaring the Circle (1985), politics and art seem to



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