Kenneth Tynan

At Magdalen College, Oxford, Tynan lived flamboyantly but was already beginning to suffer from the effects of his heavy smoking. He did not discover until much too late that he had been born with a rare lung condition, which significantly increased the damage done by smoking.

The writer Paul Johnson, who was "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." Unlike Johnson and Tynan, most undergraduates at the university had been through World War II, but were nevertheless "struck speechless" by Tynan's extravagant style.[3]

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") and had groupies ("a court of young women and admiring dons"), and gave sensational parties sometimes attended by London entertainment celebrities, Johnson wrote.[3]

Tynan produced and acted in plays, spoke "brilliantly" at the Oxford Union, wrote for and edited college magazines.[3] He retained a lifelong admiration for his tutor at Oxford, C. S. Lewis; in spite of their marked differences in outlook, Tynan viewed him as a father figure.[1]

In 1948, after the death of his father – the man he had known as Peter Tynan – Tynan learned to his surprise that "Peter Tynan" was in reality an alias of Sir Peter Peacock,[4] 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) did long-term damage to his ability to trust others.[5]

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.[6][7]

On 25 January 1951, Tynan married the American author Elaine Dundy after a three-month romance. The following year, they had a daughter, Tracy (born 12 May 1952, Westminster, London), 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.'"[3] Two years later, he left for The Observer, and it was there that he rose to prominence (1954–1958, 1960–1963).

Tynan was highly critical of what he called 'the Loamshire play', a genre of English country house drama which he felt dominated the early 1950s British stage, and was wasting the talents of playwrights and actors. Tynan espoused a new theatrical realism, best exemplified in the works of the playwrights who became known as the "Angry Young Men". There was a significant development in the 1955–56 British theatre season during which John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (and Samuel Beckett's English version of his own Waiting for Godot) premiered. Tynan championed Osborne's play, although he identified some possible flaws, concluding his review with the comment: "I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade."[8] The theatre historian Dan Rebellato asserts: "it is clear that he is set on confronting his readership, not speaking for them".[9]

"He became a power in the London theatre, which regarded him with awe, fear and hatred", Johnson wrote.[3] The reviewer "seemed to know all world literature" and studded his articles with such words as "esurient", "cateran", "cisisbeism", (sic) and "erethism".

Francis Bacon, a painter renowned for his grotesque (and often gory) works, once smiled warmly at Tynan's daughter, Tracy, and declared her to be "as pretty as a picture". This was said to be one of the few times Tynan was ever shocked into silence.

Tynan co-wrote with Harold Lang, the actor, a radio play The Quest for Corbett (1956), which was broadcast at least twice in the BBC Third Programme in the mid-1950s. From 1956 to 1958, Tynan was the script editor for Ealing Studios, and co-wrote, with Seth Holt, the film Nowhere to Go (1958).[10] 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.[3] His marriage had become increasingly difficult in spite of his success (and Dundy's: she had published her first novel in 1958). Both had extramarital affairs (though his were much more blatant than hers) and he had developed a dependence on alcohol. His sexual tastes had always favoured sadomasochism, which strained the marriage as well. Dundy wrote "To cane a woman on her bare buttocks, to hurt and humiliate her, was what gave him his greatest sexual satisfaction." 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.[3]

After his first period writing for The New Yorker, Tynan returned to The Observer in 1960 where he remained its theatre critic until mid-1963 when he joined the National Theatre.

In 1963, Laurence Olivier became the British National Theatre Company's first artistic director. Tynan had been highly dismissive of Olivier's achievements as artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre, which had opened in 1962, but he recommended himself for the role of literary manager. Olivier was initially outraged by Tynan's presumption but Olivier's wife, Joan Plowright, convinced him that Tynan would be an asset at the National Theatre Company, then based at the Old Vic theatre. When he became the National Theatre's literary manager, Tynan ceased to be the theatre critic for The Observer, but he stayed on the paper for several more years as a film reviewer.

At the National Theatre, Tynan established for himself a global reputation, Johnson wrote: "Indeed at times in the 1960s he probably had more influence than anyone else in world theatre."[3] Tynan in particular played an important role in the National's choice of plays, pushing Olivier into more adventurous selections than his own instincts might have led him to. Altogether, some 79 plays were performed during Tynan's period at the National Theatre; 32 were his idea, and another 20 chosen with his collaboration. Tynan also persuaded Olivier to play the title role in Shakespeare's Othello, something the actor had always been reluctant to do: Olivier's Othello opened at the National Theatre in 1964 to glowing reviews, and was filmed in 1965.

On 13 November 1965, Tynan participated in a live TV debate, broadcast as part of the BBC's late-night satirical show BBC-3. He was asked whether he would allow a play to be staged in which sexual intercourse was represented on the stage, and replied: "Well, I think so, certainly. I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word 'fuck' would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything which can be printed or said can also be seen." No recording survives of the programme, but Private Eye always maintained that Tynan's stammer made it the first three-syllable four-letter word. At the time, this was believed to be the first time the word "fuck" had been spoken on British television[11] – 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";[11] and the actress Miriam Margolyes, who claims to have used the word in frustration whilst appearing on University Challenge in 1963.[12] 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".[3][13]

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.[14]

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.[3] Tynan was fiercely against censorship and was determined to break taboos that he considered arbitrary.

Tynan's left-wing politics and lifestyle made him something of a poster boy for 1960s radical chic and champagne socialism in London. He suffered a serious personal defeat in the National's internal battles over his support for the Rolf Hochhuth play Soldiers, a controversial work highly critical of Winston Churchill, whose National Theatre production was eventually cancelled.