Kenneth Tynan Quotes on Theater
-
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.
-
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.
-
When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.
-
A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.
-
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.
-
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.