The ostensible purpose of this talk is to plug his recently published book, Curtains, a compilation of reviews from both The New Yorker and his earlier stint as theater critic for The Observer newspaper of London. But Tynan's universally acknowledged position as the leading authority on contemporary drama leads to a more wide-ranging discussion. His main objection to most American plays is a "strong tendency among American audiences to expect a show to come out and cause them to love it." This over-reliance on pleasing "tends to remove from the playhouse the atmosphere of critical attention." Broadway now skews either towards over-commercialization or becoming "private fantasy." He (quite presciently) predicts an "impasse," with avant-garde theater retreating to off-Broadway and the larger houses becoming over-reliant on shallow blockbusters.

One ray of hope is offered by the proposed non-profit repertory theater to be based in the then newly-constructed Lincoln Center.

Tynan's well-known acid wit is much in evidence here. Asked to choose America's two best playwrights he names "Tennessee Williams of about five years ago and Arthur Miller of about six years ago." (Interestingly, he calls A Streetcar Named Desire "the female side of Death of a Salesman.") Eugene O'Neill he dismisses as "that superb thing: the artist who can't write."

He finds American directors, while fabulously talented, distracted by the lure of Hollywood and so not able to develop the same working relationship with a company that was so notable in the Group Theater of the 30's. As for American critics, while praising the "overnight critics" as better than their English counterparts, he feels that in general the critical community suffers from being parochial. Here too he displays his typically eye for the cutting edge, singling out the young Robert Brustein and Eric Bentley for their "vivacity and knowledge."

Born in 1927, Tynan quickly established himself as the wunderkind of English theater criticism. He was fortunate to arrive just as major changes were taking place. Michael Billington notes in The Guardian,

…a series of eruptions that took place within an extraordinary year in British theatre from August 1955 to August 1956: the premieres of Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger, the flowering of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop with Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow, and the arrival of the Berliner Ensemble with a three-play Brecht season. From being a night-nurse at the bedside…Tynan suddenly turned into a midwife. Instead of wringing his hands he was able to raise his voice in salutation of a theatre that at last seemed in touch with human pain and social issues."

What made Tynan unique among critics, though, was his bravura style and a complete identification with the stage. The noted director Harold Clurman, reviewing Curtains in The New York Times, explains,

"What makes Tynan that rare phenomenon, a genuine theatre critic, is that he is disposed toward the theatre in the sense that we speak of certain people being naturally musical. Tynan experiences the theatre with his nerves, body, mind and spirit. He possesses in regard to the theatre something like absolute pitch."

Curiously, this devotion may have led to his undoing. Succumbing to the well-known temptation of "crossing over," Tynan relinquished his post to become dramaturge for the National Theater. This did not prove congenial to his talents. Perhaps, though, burnout was inevitable for a writer who invested his persona with such an air of precocious youth. As Charles Spencer laments in The Telegraph:

"It was a great loss when Olivier lured him to the National in 1963, on the principle that it was better to have him inside the tent, pissing out, rather than outside, pissing in. "God - anything to get you off that Observer," he said. …Once he'd left the National, things got worse. He became blocked as a writer, jaded, weary, and more obsessed with sado-masochism. He couldn't stop chugging down cigarettes and coughing up phlegm as his emphysema worsened. There was a late second flowering with a few fine profiles for The New Yorker, but for the most part one is left with a terrible sense of waste. 'I don't even enjoy enjoying myself any more,' he moaned."

Tynan did manage one bizarrely successful dramatic foray. He organized and wrote a sketch for Oh! Calcutta!, a sex revue that was quite controversial and ran for years in both New York and London. One is left with the sense, though, of a talent looking for a form through which to shine. Tynan himself ruefully noted, "A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car." Yet in his criticism there is much excellent writing, humor, striking perception, and genuine passion. Perhaps he couldn't drive, but he could soar.

Kenneth Tynan died in 1980, at the age of fifty-three.