In praise of Kenneth Tynan
Friday, September 25th, 2009
As Dominic Cavendish asked me to put the text up on the website, I’ll renege on my announcement not to write another blog and am posting as the last one for the road a short speech I gave when awarded the journalism prize of the Anglistentag at Klagenfurt this week:
When I still thought it a worthwhile occupation to publish academic books, those were sometimes reviewed in learned journals with tiny circulation figures. After a while I stopped reading them because they basically argued along the same lines: This may all be very well but unfortunately it got an irremediable flaw – it’s far too journalistic. Therefore you can imagine my absolute surprise and sense of belated satisfaction when I received the news that the Anglistentag (i.e. the society of departments of English in Germany, Austria and Switzerland) would like to give me of all things a journalism award.
At the time I received those professorial telling-offs I naively would have paraphrased “journalistic” with: readable, concise and – dare I say it – entertaining. However, I soon had to realise that the academic colleagues defined it as: too opinionated, flippantly anecdotic and not metatheoretical enough. So I thought it advisable not to contemplate a career at university but to follow in the footsteps of my then idol, the critic Kenneth Tynan. He had a motto pinned over his writing table saying: “Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy.” I never read a better piece of stylistic advice.
Tynan called John Gielgud “the finest actor on earth from the neck up”, Ralph Richardson “the glass eye in the forehead of English acting” and referred to a female performer as “fetchingly got up in what I can best describe as a Freudian slip”. My favourite bit always was his praise for Joyce Redman as Laurence Olivier’s Cordelia: “Her best moments came after she was dead. She lies quite loose and limp while Olivier practises on her the most brutal enormities of artificial respiration, coiling her about him and pounding breast, belly and rump. Her inertia in this scene was profoundly moving.”
When you read stuff like that at an impressionable age, it’s what you’ll desperately try to emulate but all too often fail to achieve. As a young critic you like nothing better than doing hatchet jobs. After all they’re more fun to write and the vocabulary for them is far more variable than for the positive reviews. But Tynan also taught you not to become cynical and to keep your enthusiasm. The older he got, the more he wrote only about the things and the persons he liked and that’s how it should be. Reviewing Waiting for Godot he claimed that “a play is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored.”
Tynan after his time as a theatre critic worked as a dramaturg, and I duly did the same. We only parted company when he made millions in royalties from a nude revue with the title “Oh Calcutta!” That was a quite ingenious pun on “oh, quel cul t’as”. Unfortunately Tynan in his later life took those words a bit too literally and developed an unhealthy passion for spanking young women’s bare buttocks. For better or for worse both activities weren’t realistic options for me.
Rather, during my various jobs as a dramaturg I had begun to translate plays and continued to write and lecture about them. When you start working as a dramaturg you should be aware of the fact that it is only a transitory occupation anyway, so in 2005 I took the risk of going freelance and since then am able to sleep far better, as I no longer receive early morning or late night phone calls from artistic directors screaming hysterically down the line. Also I am in the comfortable position of being a mere guest at universities which allows me to associate the city of Bologna only with a nice Morandi museum and a mediocre Serie A-club.
I see it as my task to act as a sort of unofficial propagator for new British and Irish plays. My main field of research are the problems of cultural transfer occurring when you import them to the German-speaking theatre which is so markedly different from the Anglo-Saxon scene. Ideally I do what I would like to do anyway and sometimes even get paid for it. Working freelance you quickly learn that nothing can be taken for granted, least of all a prize as prestigious as yours. So I am very grateful to the jury for awarding it to me and for using the word “journalistic” in a way that is so close to mine. Thank you very much.
