BOO KS
'4'
discourse is not Tynan's strong point. When, for example, he tries to
make an intellectual demonstration of the weaknesses of MacLeish's
J.
B.
and decides that these are due to the author's failure to take account of
"Oriental philosophy," the reader would settle gladly for a simple
parody: a Zen
J.
B.
by MacLeish is too horribly easy to imagine-that
is just the trouble. Like most of the humorists who have written about
the theatre, Tynan is less a critic than a performer and mime in his
own right; his reviews are excited performances. He can make you see
and hear an actor, sometimes a whole play or rather its production; he
can spot a defect or a virtue, but he cannot reason or analyze. It is
interesting that in a long "probing" piece on Shaw he fails to mention
his intelligence. Instead he discovers what he takes to be a telling fact
about Shaw, a give-away: "as a public playwright he could not create
an artist; Dubedat is a parasite, and Marchbanks is a hollow fraud...."
This evidently expects the reader-response "How terrible!" But what
public playwright could "create an artist?" Sophocles, Shakespeare, Con–
greve, Moliere, Wilde, John Osborne??? He suggests, sententiously, that
Shaw was "scared to feel," yet there was a generous passion in Shaw
that is absent from Tynan, who is most unconvincing when he is most
in earnest, when he is writing valentines to Tennessee Williams, worship–
ping the Berliner Ensemble, exposing Ionesco ("as a serious thinker
he is banal").
On his "positive" side, Tynan tends to write advertising copy. "This
is an honest performance, true and watchful and ruthless." "The im–
posture is total and terrifying." "Peter Brook plants us firmly in Mexico."
"... an artistic credo as stimulating as any in our time"-this of
Arthur Miller's preface to
A View from the Bridge.
And of Miller and
Tennessee Williams: "the finest two playwrights at present writing in
English." "The exciting thing about Mr. Lawler is that he can also
construct." This "quotable" manner of praising is sometimes like
Time
magazihe, sometimes like
Mademoiselle:
"a select gaggle of alumni
that includes Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Eli Wallach, Marilyn Mon–
roe ..." He talks of "meaty" dialogue and refers to King Lear as "this
huge flawed pyramid of a play." A "punchy" style of writing, packing
in the metaphors, to advertise to the customers that it
is
writing.
At his best-on Sir Laurence Olivier, on Vivien Leigh-he is far,
far better than these samples, but it
is
not a case of Homer nodding.
In comparison with the average dramatic critic, he is a Angel, as
Magwitch might say, but he will not bear comparison with Shaw, with
Stark Young, with, today, Nicola Chiaromonte in Italy or Francis Fer–
gusson in America, though it is not fair, probably, to compare him with
