Kenneth Tynan citáty
Kenneth Tynan
Datum narození: 2. duben 1927
Datum úmrtí: 26. červenec 1980
Kenneth Tynan byl britský divadelní kritik.
Citáty Kenneth Tynan
„Vypadá jako další v davové scéně od Hieronyma Bosche.“
o Donu Ricklesovi
Originál: (en) He looks like an extra in a crowd scene by Hieronymus Bosch.
Zdroj: [Tynan, Kenneth, Show people: profiles in entertainment, Simon and Schuster, 1979, 978-0-67125-012-6, 142, anglicky]
„Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a peeping Tom, and I will show you the makings of a dramatist.“
Pausing on the Stairs (1957)<!-- also quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (2014 edition) -->
Kontext: Useless, of course, to point out that the genesis of good plays is hardly ever abstract; that it tends, on the contrary, to be something as concrete and casual as a glance intercepted, a remark overheard, or an insignificant news item buried at the bottom of page three. Yet it is by trivialities like these that the true playwright's blood is fired. They spur him to story-telling; they bring on the narrative fit that is his glory and his basic credential. Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a peeping Tom, and I will show you the makings of a dramatist. Only the makings, of course: curiosity about people is merely the beginning of the road to the masterpiece: but if that curiosity is sustained you will find, when the rules have been mastered and the end has been reached, that a miracle has happened.
„Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source.“
Curtains (1961)
Kontext: Art 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.
„People have always needed art: but why have they needed it?“
Review of The Necessity of Art (1959) by Ernest Fischer
Kontext: People have always needed art: but why have they needed it? And what shaped the forms by which they satisfied their need? … In the arts form tends to be conservative, and content to be revolutionary; it is novelty of content that precedes, demands and imposes novelty of form.
„I believe in neither a director’s nor a writer’s theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences.“
Letter to George Devine (10 March 1964), printed in Kenneth Tynan : A Life by Dominic Shellard<!-- Yale University Press, 2003, --> , p. 292
Kontext: I believe in neither a director’s nor a writer’s theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such. That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium.
„That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me.“
Letter to George Devine (10 March 1964), printed in Kenneth Tynan : A Life by Dominic Shellard<!-- Yale University Press, 2003, --> , p. 292
Kontext: I believe in neither a director’s nor a writer’s theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such. That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium.
„I do not see the EEC as a great love affair. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope.“
"This going into Europe will not turn out to be the thrilling mutual exchange supposed. It is more like nine middle aged couples with failing marriages meeting in a darkened bedroom in a Brussels hotel for a group grope." - E.P. Thompson, "On the Europe Debate," The London Times (27 March 1975) http://www.bloomsbury.com/ARC/detail.asp?EntryID=104755&bid=5
Misattributed
„His puritan, muscular, moor-tramping soul (superbly mirrored in Higgins's hymn to the intellect in Pygmalion) bred in him a loathing of all things, whether poems or gadgets, that were designed to comfort the human condition without actively trying to improve it.“
"Bernard Shaw," p. 103
Profiles (1990)
„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.“
Review of After the Fall, by Arthur Miller, at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, New York; Blues for Mister Charlie, by James Baldwin at the ANTA Theatre, New York (1962), p. 143
„How 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.“
Review of Le Misanthrope, by Molière, at the Piccadilly (1962), p. 117
„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.“
As quoted in "Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly" by Godfrey Smith in The New York Times (9 January 1966)
„A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence.“
Review of The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton (1961), p. 75
„It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.“
Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, X, 5. This particular translation of the original Latin is from the essay "On Liberty" by Abraham Cowley: "Sallust, therefore, who was well acquainted with them both and with many such-like gentlemen of his time, says, 'That it is the nature of ambition' (Ambitio multos mortales falsos fieri coegit, etc.) 'to make men liars and cheaters; to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths; to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.'" http://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext02/cowes10.txt The Wikiquote page for Sallust has the quote and a different translation.
Misattributed
„Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.“
"Orson Welles" (1961), p. 297
