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Drama criticism ... is a self-knowing account of the way in which one's consciousness has been modified during an evening at the theatre.

Kenneth Tynan

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Kenneth Tynan
Age: 53 †
Born: 1927
Born: April 2
Died: 1980
Died: July 26
Actor
Critic
Diarist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Theatre Critic
Writer
Birmingham
West Midlands
Kenneth Peacock Tynan
Ken Tynan
Self
Account
Way
Evening
Theatre
Accounts
Criticism
Drama
Consciousness
Knowing
Modified

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The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding, the chin in doubt, and the chin at bay.
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The vengeful hag is played by Ingrid Bergman, which is like casting Eleanor Roosevelt as Lizzie Borden.
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Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist.
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A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
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Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.
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Dichotomy = operation performed on lesbians to make them normal.
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It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.
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When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.
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I do not see the E.E.C. [European Economic Community] as a great love affair. It's more like nine middle aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope.
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In most writers, style is a welcome, an invitation, a letting down of the drawbridge between the artist and the world. Shaw had no time for such ruses. Unlike most of his countrymen, he abominated charm, which he regarded as evidence of chronic temperamental weakness.
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Does the critic wish to influence the kind of film that costs more than £250,000? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors explaining that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car.
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A useful word previously unknown to me: 'ergophobia', meaning 'fear or hatred of work'. At last I can define myself in one word.
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Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.
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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.
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I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.
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When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.
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There, standing at the piano, was the original good time who had been had by all.
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William Congreve is the only sophisticated playwright England has produced and like Shaw, Sheridan, and Wilde, his nearest rivals, he was brought up in Ireland.
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The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional.
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