6 Kenneth Tynan Quotes on Theater

Kenneth Tynan quotes on theater

1. A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

2. John Osborne spoke out in a vein of ebullient, free-wheeling rancour that betokened the arrival of something new in the theatre - a sophisticated, articulate lower-class. Most of the critics were offended by Jimmy Porter, but not on account of his anger; a working-class hero is expected to be angry. What nettled them was something quite different: his self-confidence. This was no envious inferior whose insecurity they could pity.

3. When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.

23. A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.

24. I believe in neither a director's nor a writer's theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such. That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium.

29. No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.