Kenneth Tynan. He was right about critics. He was (She said, hopefully) probably speaking from a perspective of age and experience.
One of my emails this morning informed me that February 25, 2024 is the 53rd anniversary of the opening, at New York’s Belasco Theatre, of Oh, Calcutta!, a play written by, among others, Kenneth Tynan.
Tynan, one of the most famous British theatre critics of the late twentieth century, was born in the UK city of Birmingham, on April 2, 1927, and this mention stirred in me not the memory of his illegitimacy, his antics at Oxford, his collaboration with Roman Polanski (with Hugh Hefner, on a Macbeth movie, complete with the infamous nude witches scene), or his eventual professional diminishment after his family’s move to California in 1976.
No.
My instant reaction was a memory of my mother.
Now, to be completely clear, Mum functioned in my family as the Forrest Gump character. She was always running into famous people, apropos of doing nothing other than living her life: Duke Ellington. Anne Murray. Colonel Sanders. Harry Secombe. Cozy Cole. Danny Kaye. Probably others.**
Her childhood holidays in Cornwall were sometimes spent in the company of Bertrand Russell (this is how I came to hear of his “Dirty Bertie” nickname, one which caused me difficulties in ever taking him seriously when I came across him later in life, in college courses), his third wife Patricia, and their young son Conrad.
And when my mother was very young, before the outbreak of WWII, she used to walk to school in a small group of children, one of whom she always described as a “little boy with an awfully spotty face, and a very nasty disposition.”
Kenneth Tynan.
Funny how memory works. Don’t you think?
PS: From Wikipedia’s Kenneth Tynan page—
At thirteen, he was nearly killed when a parachute landmine destroyed the houses on the other side of the Birmingham street where the Tynans lived, killing the inhabitants.
Mum often told the story about the house directly opposite to her family, waking up one morning (after sleeping overnight in the bomb shelter underneath the living room floor) to discover that it had been flattened, killing all the inhabitants.
**Oh, yeah. Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Philip. Princess Alexandra. I forgot about them.
