Diary – 8 October 2004

I spent three weeks rehearsing Tynan, a monologue devised by Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers from Kenneth Tynan’s posthumously published journals. It’s a lonely business rehearsing a monologue. You sit on the stage in the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon like Jonah in the belly of the whale. My voice, which was also having to cope with King Lear’s nocturnal tirades at the RST, started to crack and rasp in protest.

What is the function of a drama critic? Tynan defined it thus: ‘A critic’s job, nine tenths of it, is to make way for the good by demolishing the bad.’ This perfectly describes his own self-appointed task. The English theatre, when Tynan began writing reviews for The Spectator more than half a century ago, was bravely pretending that nothing much had happened since Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke in Sarajevo. Tynan undertook to drag this theatre into the 20th century and he performed this task with all the bloodthirsty relish of a Tamburlaine, leaving hecatombs of decapitated plays and mortally wounded players in his wake.