My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  The old place was transformed, and my first visits there, with my school on a typical ILEA matinee outing, instantly revised my understanding of what was possible in the theatre. The acting company was a crack unit, strong at every level, with the old warrior, Olivier, leading from the front; but everybody there – ushers, bookstall staff, coffee vendors, all in their smartly functional uniforms – seemed part of the enterprise, which had a swaggering sense of itself that stemmed directly from the boss. Some fairly brutal alterations had been made to the original scheme of the foyers, the walls covered with brown hessian which could be covering hardboard as likely as bricks. Olivier, he claimed, had never liked the Old Vic, where he had his first classical triumphs, and he certainly remade the old place. But it remained recognisably Lilian Baylis’s theatre. When, later, I became an usher, I discovered that the password in case of fire was ‘Miss Baylis is in the house’, which struck me as rather risky, since many of her original customers, now elderly, were regular visitors to the National: the thought of her suddenly wheeling lopsidedly round the corner, frying pan in hand, to take up her usual position in the stage box, there to cook her supper, as was her nightly wont, could easily have given them a heart attack.

  As a supplement to theatre-going, I was reading insatiably. I found plays wonderfully easy to read: I seemed to see them in my mind’s eye as I turned the pages, and raced my way through all of Congreve, Racine, Molière, Goethe, Wilde, Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Maugham, Wesker, Osborne, Jarry, in a state of high excitement, further fanned by Shaw’s theatre reviews, the manifestos of Artaud and Edward Gordon Craig, and Eric Bentley’s brilliantly lucid theoretical writings. But best of all was Kenneth Tynan, whose reviews were still coming hot off the press every week in the Observer. I had read him from the early Sixties and began to find his collections in second-hand bookshops. His sense of occasion, his power of sensuous evocation, his youthful audacity, his political provocativeness, his visceral response to great acting – all these spoke of the theatre as both wildly exciting and very important. The following is a review of Dominic Shellard’s biography.

  Tynan’s career as a critic was brief out of all proportion to his subsequent réclame. First at the Evening Standard, and then, triumphantly, at the Observer, his survey of the British theatre lasted just over ten years, after which the poacher turned gamekeeper, and he took up his post at the Old Vic, where he attempted to put into effect the vision he had so vividly articulated in print. With the publication of the remarkably frank and searching Life by his widow, Kathleen, and the subsequent appearance of his Letters and Diaries, and a memoir by his first wife, Elaine Dundy, he has become the best known theatre critic who ever wrote. Even James Agate, the legendary critic of the Sunday Times, the many volumes of whose ongoing Diary, Ego, fill most of a bookshelf, is obscure by comparison. All this is just as Tynan would have wished. What would surely have surprised him is that, despite the availability in print of his dazzling collection of Profiles, none of his critical work – published during his lifetime in various manifestations as Curtains, Tynan on Theatre, Tynan Right and Left – can currently be bought; not even the most brilliant of them all, his precocious first volume He That Plays the King, a Cyril Connollyesque study of theatre with the critic as hero at its centre. Tynan himself has eclipsed his work. This is a grievous loss for anyone remotely interested in theatre in the twentieth century, or indeed in theatre tout court. It is the purpose of Dominic Shellard’s scholarly and rather sober book to focus attention again on what he feels is Tynan’s real achievement.

  He is quite right to do so. Tynan’s account of the dramatic life of his times is not only irresistibly entertaining, but also gives a vivid if unashamedly prejudiced picture of one of the great turning points in the history of the British theatre; perhaps of equal importance, it is as good an advertisement for the delights of theatre-going as has ever been written. Anyone reading those reviews would be irresistibly impelled – as I, a portly suburban child in the mid-Sixties, most certainly was – to go and see a play. Any play, really: Tynan had the uncommon gift of making flops sound as intriguing as hits. For him, theatre was an arena, a corrida: glory to the victor, but glory to the loser for having fought. He started writing reviews in the early 1950s when the theatre was at its most becalmed, and his attempts to stir it up were instrumental in creating the climate in which a new sort of theatre, represented by the Royal Court, by Peter Hall’s Arts Theatre and by Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Workshop, arose. He was for a while this new theatre’s prophet, its chronicler and its conscience, but then he felt the need to be involved in creating theatre rather than observing it.

  This tension between participating and observing is central to his life; the central problem of his life, one might say. To him criticism was a conscious act of performance, and the persona he adopted was securely in place by the time he arrived at Oxford, like Oscar Wilde, in fancy dress, dispensing brilliant judgements and outrageous provocations to his astounded contemporaries. The theatre was his chosen arena, and he set about directing with some energy. His quest to be associated with celebrity was already well-established; Donald Wolfit, Paul Scofield and Robert Helpmann all attended the first night of his production of the First Quarto of Hamlet (he had previously directed it at school). From Oxford he went to Lichfield Rep, where he staged twenty-four plays in as many weeks; subsequently he directed for Binkie Beaumont at the Lyric Hammersmith and leased the Bedford, Camden for a somewhat unsuccessful season. But he was already writing, and it was that, rather than his solid work in rep, from which he accrued the attention and excitement that he craved. His career as a director came to an end when he was ignominiously removed from a production of Les Parents Terribles; and Alec Guinness’s eccentric casting of him as the Player King in his own ill-fated production of Hamlet led to universal derision. But the inside knowledge of the processes of theatre thus gained, allied to his cocky, bobby-dazzling style, gave a unique vividness to his reviews. He was, as a bonus, one of the funniest writers of his time; his best jokes still make one laugh out loud. ‘Theatre cramps him,’ he wrote of the barnstorming Donald Wolfit. ‘He would be happiest, I feel, in a large field.’ John Gielgud’s mellifluous production of Richard II, with Paul Scofield in the title role, was ‘an essay, on Mr Gielgud’s part, of mass ventriloquism’; he remarks on Vivien Leigh’s ‘dazzling vocal monotony’. His comment on Edwige Feuillière’s acclaimed Phèdre is funny, too, but an utterly brilliant vivisection of a performance which perfectly describes something with which we are all familiar: ‘Her performance is an immensely graceful apology for Phèdre, a sort of obituary notice composed by a well-wishing friend: but it is never a life, nakedly lived.’

  The final phrase of this sentence, if it does not summarise the whole of Tynan’s aspiration for the theatre, is certainly a vivid indication of what he expected out of it. His appetite for the stimulation that he felt the theatre could uniquely offer was immense, and informs all his criticism. He needed good theatre, as an addict craves his drug, as a starving man craves nourishment. This is what makes his reviews so urgent and so personal and quite unlike those of any other critic who has ever written. He announced his credo with absolute clarity: ‘The critic [has done his job] if he evokes, precisely and with all his prejudices clearly charted, the state of his mind after the performance has impinged upon it… he will find readers only if he writes clearly and gaily and truly; if he regards himself as a specially treated mirror recording a unique and unrepeatable event.’ Somewhat disingenuously, he claims that ‘the true critic cares little for the here and now… his real rendezvous is with posterity. His review is better addressed to the future; to people thirty years hence who may wonder exactly what it felt like to be in a certain playhouse on a certain distant night.’ In reality, of course, his review can only tell us what it felt like to be Ken Tynan in a certain playhouse on a certain distant night; but that is more than enough when Ken Tynan is as interesting and perpetually interested as he was. It
is equally disingenuous to pretend that he had no desire to influence his own times. On the contrary, his agenda in that regard was quite naked. He savagely attacked the institution of censorship in the form of the Lord Chamberlain (‘the ex-Governor of Bombay’, as he relentlessly calls him), the moribund West End, the perceived inadequacies of certain actors, the life-denying philosophy, as he saw it, behind the Theatre of the Absurd. He provoked mercilessly, and without regard to friendship. He caused much pain. The actor and director Sam Wanamaker was driven to great epistolary lengths to rebut Tynan’s wickedly negative account of one of his performances: ‘I will not accept and will fight against your almost psychopathic desire to denigrate me and my work,’ raged Wanamaker. ‘You have no real convictions except those of an avant-garde opportunist… you are a fraud as a critic and will never grow into a great one (which potential you have) until you develop humility and respect for honest work, integrity and sincerity… the most vitriolic piece of critical groin-kicking I have ever come across.’ Tynan was bewildered by this response, just as he failed to understand why Orson Welles didn’t welcome him backstage after he had reviewed Welles’s performance of Othello as ‘Citizen Coon’. He wanted to be a licensed jester in the Shakespeare manner, allowed to say the unsayable, to make the forbidden joke. He loved, he said, testing people; Dundy, in a marvellous phrase, alludes to his primary tactic: to ‘pour oil on troubled waters and then light it.’

  To him it was all a game, a serious game, but a game nonetheless. There is an obvious analogy here with the aspect of his life that has now become notorious, his addiction to sadomasochistic sex. The pain is not the point, Tynan argues, and anyway, it doesn’t really hurt. Oh yes it did, says Elaine Dundy, whom he liked to cane, and oh yes it did, cry the many victims of his lashing prose. What is startlingly clear from Shellard’s book is that the rift between Tynan’s persona and his private longings rapidly grew to the point that it was increasingly difficult for him to sustain. He needed to out himself in order to get a sense of his own reality, always an elusive matter with him. ‘You are the only proof that I exist,’ he told Dundy during one of their many separations; in his diary he notes ‘My persona and myself have never properly matched.’ After leaving the National he persistently tried to produce a film about his erotic tastes; in his erotic revues, Oh! Calcutta! and Carte Blanche, he attempted to persuade his collaborators to include sketches celebrating them. Rather riskily, he even makes an allusion in a jolly letter to Laurence Oliver thanking him for securing his severance pay for him, among the beneficiaries of which will be ‘Miss Floggy’s finishing school in Maida Vale’. Shellard does not seek to psychoanalyse Tynan, but this is all pretty standard textbook stuff: he grew up not knowing that he was the illegitimate son of a father who had an entirely separate family elsewhere, and that his very existence was a secret. He felt all his life the compulsion to share the secret, and to announce and re-announce his existence to the world at large, obsessed with greatness (‘that inner uproar’) in others.

  Apart from theatre, music was the great passion of my life, although I was quite slow in discovering music theatre. Everything in my grandmother’s house revolved around music; there was music to get up to, music to eat to, above all music to drink to, mostly provided by the radio, but for special occasions there was the collection of a hundred or so shellac records, scratched, cracked, bitten into. On what must in that early stereophonic era have been one of the last fully functioning 78 rpm radiograms, we untiringly listened to them. Most of them were of operatic arias, almost without exception from the Italian verismo repertory, and of these, more than ninety per cent were from operas by Puccini. A remarkably large number of them were tenor arias; Gigli – seen in the substantial flesh from the gods at Covent Garden by my mother and aunt in the late Thirties – was the presiding genius, his caressing liquidness swooned over, his sobs sobbed along with. Di Stefano and the briefly famous Luigi Alva were similarly lauded for their sweetness, while for heft, Björling was the man, ‘Nessun Dorma’ and ‘Ch’ella Mi Creda Libero’ thrilled to over and over. My aunt was quite frank about the sexually stirring effect of those Nordic high Cs flung out like javelins. ‘Oomph! Gorgeous. Let’s hear it again!’ Sopranos were less loved; the house diva was plump-toned Joan Hammond – ‘Ah, love me a li-toll’ – while Callas – briefly heard on the radio – was despised. ‘Ugly, ugly, ugly.’ Baritones were rare: I can recall only Tito Gobbi; non-operatic Gobbi, actually: The Legend of the Glass Mountain. But it was Gobbi, as it turned out, who fixed for ever in my mind the ideal of what opera might be. In Opera and Me, written for the Independent in 1995, to coincide with my production of Il Trittico at Broomhill, I explain how.

  It must have been 1965. A Friday night. Two school chums and I were wandering about the centre of town as we usually did at the end of the school week, on a sort of tea-crawl from one Joe Lyons to another, gossiping, dreaming, showing off, smoking furiously, when we happened to drift into Floral Street, down by the Royal Opera House, past the entrance to the gallery. People were filing in; idly I glanced at the poster and saw that they were doing something called Il Trittico. Never heard of it. ‘It’s by Puccini,’ I suddenly noticed. ‘Never heard of him,’ my chums said. I scorned their ignorance. Then I saw that Tito Gobbi was singing in it; had indeed directed it, whatever it was. That settled it. ‘We have to see this,’ I said. They were aghast. We were not what you might call theatregoers at the best of times: and were we now going to submit to an evening of foreign yowling written by one unknown wop, starring another? Somehow I swung it, we paid our three shillings and we found ourselves in the slips, hanging suicidally through the bars at right angles to the stage like three culture-loving gargoyles.

  The first shock was the sound. I’d never been to a concert, never (apart from my grandmother) heard a live singing voice, and by that marvellously democratic trick of the architects of the Opera House, here, clinging to the rafters, we were exposed far more vividly to the full glory of that swelling, complex orchestra bringing Paris to life than were the toffs sitting a hundred miles below. The voices seemed only a yard away. The physical impact of Gobbi’s voice was sensational, his unmistakable tone, here, in the first of the three operas, Il Tabarro, hardened to reveal the bargee’s bitterness, frustration and despair. It was completely direct: like someone talking to you, someone you knew inside out. I had not heard this before: Björling was always Björling, Gigli always Gigli. They were the noise they made. This was different: a character, a human being. I risked decapitation or at the very least traction as I strained for a glimpse of the physical embodiment of this person so far only heard, not seen. There, finally, at the centre of the grim stage picture, was a man wearing a polo-neck jumper, rough trousers and jacket and some kind of a cap, a man who might have just come off the street. But one was riveted by this ordinary man; the impacted force of his pain sucked you into him. Suddenly, shockingly, by some turn of the head which seemed wholly natural, his eyes would rake the auditorium and you saw the anguish through them as clearly as if you had X-rayed his heart. Puccini’s unforgiving, unrelenting river welled up and up and with it my tears.

  The interval was a little embarrassing, me snuffling, them bored. The chums had not been having the best time; we went off and smoked passionately then returned for more, they somewhat as if they were about to settle in for double maths. There’s no point now in my pretending that I enjoyed Sister Angelica any more than they did though at the time I worked myself up into some sort of synthetic ecstasy. For Catholic schoolboys to spend an unrelieved fifty-three minutes with twenty nuns after school stretched aesthetic aspiration to breaking point, and anyway, where were the tunes? After the next interval and five more cigarettes each, they decided that it could only get worse and jacked it in. I stubbornly stayed, and so set my life on its future course.

  I had been totally unprepared for Gobbi’s comic genius. That the granite figure of Il Tabarro should within an hour or so be replaced by this gargoyle, tip-nose
d, rubber-mouthed, agile as a monkey, was, and is, uncanny. What was going on around him on stage and in the pit was pretty lively too, but he positively became the music, mercurially transforming himself from bar to bar. He seemed constantly to take – and I do not doubt did take – his fellow singers by surprise, an anarch at the centre of things, pure energy, only finally coming to seem benevolent in time for Schicchi’s final address to the audience, and then only temporarily. Simply the thing he was, made him live.

  Well, this was IT. I rushed home to proclaim the new gospel. Björling and Gigli, brassy top Cs and creamy cavatinas OUT; character in music and music in action IN. With cruel indifference to the feelings of those with whom I had but days before sobbed and cooed over the old discs, I found a new mentor. I disappeared for long periods to my best friend Billy Brown’s next door. His father Andrew was my guru. He seemed to have stepped out of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale: nearly seventy then, a violinist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, but also a student of the Koran, a practitioner of yoga, a brewer of mead, a painter, a clockmaker and a reconstructor of ancient instruments. And all this in Streatham. At my urgent demand he regaled us, Billy and me, from his vast experience of playing in orchestra pits since the early Twenties, with the stories of the operas. Not perfunctorily: he described the characters, explained their predicaments. Nobody could have done it more vividly. No opera producer could have conveyed the story as simply, as powerfully. Operas, he made clear, were simply plays told in music. I understood.