Kenneth Peacock Tynan

Kenneth Peacock Tynan , 1927-80, English drama critic, author, and theatrical executive, b. Birmingham, England. During the 1950s, while writing for The Observer, Tynan was widely regarded as Britain's most brilliant, insightful, and influential drama critic. He espoused a new theatrical realism best exemplified in the works of the angry young men . For a decade (1963-73) he was literary manager of the National Theatre of Great Britain. Tynan's last years, spent in Los Angeles, were filled with disappointment and unhappiness and were artistically enlivened primarily by a series of lengthy profiles he wrote for The New Yorker magazine. Among his books are Curtains (1961) and Show People: Profiles in Entertainment (1979).

Bibliography: See his letters, ed. by his wife, K. Tynan (1998); his diaries, ed. by J. Lahr (2001); biography by K. Tynan (1987).

Tynan, Kenneth (Peacock) (1927–80), dramatic critic, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He wrote for various papers, most influentially for the Observer (1954–63), and championed the plays of Osborne, Wesker, Delaney, Simpson, Beckett, and others, playing a leading role in the shift of taste from drawing-room comedy and the poetic drama of T. S. Eliot and C. Fry (which he disliked) to naturalism and ‘working-class drama’ (see kitchen sink drama). His collections of reviews and essays include Curtains (1967), The Sound of Two Hands Clapping (1975), and A View of the English Stage (1976), which pay tribute to the role of the English Stage Company. Tynan was also a moving force in the creation of the National Theatre. See also, theatre criticism.

Tynan, Kenneth Peacock (1927–80), English dramatic critic, who worked for the Observer, 1954–8, and again, 1960–3, and for the New Yorker, 1958–60. He was literary manager of the National Theatre, 1963–9 (after which he became resident in the United States): as a strong opponent of censorship he fought, and lost, a battle for the production of Hochhuth's controversial play Soldiers at the National, and he was one of the play's co-producers when it was finally staged at the New Theatre (now the Albery) in 1968. Equally controversial, but a good deal more successful, was the ‘evening of elegant erotica’ Oh! Calcutta! which he devised. It opened in New York in 1969 and in London a year later, having long runs in both cities.