Biography: If Kenneth Tynan has left a permanent legacy - and this is open to debate - it is that his career warns other critics of their works' ephemerality. Readers under the age of 40 would be entitled to ask: "Kenneth who?" Tynan, once so famous, at least in theatrical circles, spent his life trying to ensure such a query would never be made, writes Robert O'Byrne.
More than 20 years after his death, the effort has proven ineffectual. It is a truism that no-one ever raised a statue to a critic. Despite Dominic Shellard's pleading, Kenneth Tynan will remain uncommemorated by any monument.
He was born in Manchester in 1927, the illegitimate son of a northern English politician and businessman called Sir Peter Peacock. The young Tynan was precociously bright and, despite a potentially disabling stammer, fabulously self-confident. As an Oxford undergraduate immediately after the end of the second World War, he was a peacock by nature if not by name and outshone most of his contemporaries. Hunger for an audience naturally drew him to the theatre after he left university. Tynan tried a number of options - actor, director, producer - but none of them was entirely satisfactory, and increasingly he found the greatest pleasure, and income, came from his critical work. After serving his apprenticeship on a number of other newspapers, he became theatre critic of the Observer in 1954 and retained that position for the next eight years.
Shellard only briefly investigates the possibility that Tynan's stammer, which inhibited his speech, helped to make the written word so important to him as a means of communication. On the other hand, he spends a great deal of this book advocating the importance of his subject's weekly reviews: one chapter is even entitled 'Writing for Posterity'. The problem is that posterity has shown relatively little interest in Tynan's bequest. Theatre criticism is as transitory as the performances it judges, no matter how great the standard of either. To give one arresting example: Tynan was consistently damning of Vivien Leigh as a stage performer even while he lauded the work of her husband, Laurence Olivier. Yet posterity will judge both not by their theatrical but by their cinematic careers, and here Leigh is the clear winner, with a fascinating portfolio of films (Gone with the Wind, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone) that compare favourably to those of Olivier, most of which were either terribly stagey (Henry V, Richard III) or just plain awful (Sleuth, Marathon Man). No doubt Olivier was the greatest stage actor of his generation, but we cannot see that. Posterity, like the rest of us, has seen only the films and those of his quondam wife were very often better. In this light, Tynan's criticism of her stage roles, although often funny - he wrote that she played the part of Shakespeare's Cleopatra "with the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag" - also seem unnecessarily cruel and vindictive, especially when unrelieved by even occasional praise.
Tynan was the proverbial young man in a hurry, but without possessing the requisite sense of where his destination might be. As a result, he ended up all over the place. In 1962, having encouraged the creation of a British National Theatre, he was offered the position there of its dramaturg. This is a role ideally suited to someone who prefers to remain behind the scenes and out of the spotlight; Tynan was most definitely not that person. He wanted, literally, to be centre-stage and, at least within the world of newspaper critics, had so been while employed by the Observer. His time at the National Theatre was a disappointment, not least to himself, who had entertained such high expectations. Incapable of working as one member of a team, he alienated everyone around him, including Olivier, who had originally championed him. After he left the NT in 1972, his life began a sad downward spiral to an early death eight years later.
Today, Tynan is less likely to be remembered as a theatre critic than as the driving force behind a vaguely titillating show called Oh Calcutta!, as the first person to say the word "fuck" on British television (a perfect instance of his pathological need to be noticed), and, since the publication of his diaries two years ago, as someone obsessed with sado-masochistic sexual encounters.
Will this new biography help to redress what its author perceives to be an unfair imbalance in the perception of Tynan? Probably not, precisely because Shellard concentrates too exhaustively on the years at the Observer, drawing attention to an inordinate number of plays and players meriting only oblivion. And he writes of the differences in judgment between Tynan and his opposite number at the Sunday Times, Harold Hobson, as though this were a titanic struggle rather than merely two critics who did not always agree.
It looks as though posterity will continue to pay little attention to Kenneth Tynan.
Robert O'Byrne is a writer and critic. His book, Living in Dublin, will be published in September
Kenneth Tynan: A Life. By Dominic Shellard, Yale University Press, 399pp, £25