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.
Kenneth TynanI 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.
Kenneth TynanA 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.
Kenneth TynanA city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.
Kenneth TynanA good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.
Kenneth TynanWilliam Congreve is the only sophisticated playwright England has produced; and like Shaw, Sheridan, and Wilde, his nearest rivals, he was brought up in Ireland.
Kenneth TynanThe sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.
Kenneth TynanThe buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.
Kenneth TynanIt is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.
Kenneth TynanShow me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist.
Kenneth TynanArt 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.
Kenneth TynanPornography is writing that seeks primarily, even exclusively, to bring about sexual stimulation. This can be done crudely or delicately. In the former case it would be bad literature; in the latter good.
Kenneth TynanDrama criticism ... is a self-knowing account of the way in which one's consciousness has been modified during an evening at the theatre.
Kenneth TynanA novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.
Kenneth TynanNot content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clenches his fist.
Kenneth TynanWestern man, especially the Western critic, still find it very had to go into print and say: "I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection."
Kenneth TynanNo theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.
Kenneth TynanThe buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional.
Kenneth TynanThe greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.
Kenneth TynanHow far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.
Kenneth TynanArt and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.
Kenneth Tynan