Profiles

by Kenneth Tynan and Kathleen Tynan

Book Overview

Shares impressions of Bertolt Brecht, Noel Coward, George Cukor, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Arthur Miller, Laurence Olivier, Tom Stoppard, and Orson Welles.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060965576
• ISBN13: 9780060965570
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 437 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

THE BEST WRITER ON THE ART OF THEATRE

Just as James Agee (deceased) and Pauline Kael (alive, but retired) remain the best writers on the Art of Film, so Kenneth Tynan (again, deceased) is still the best writer on the Art of Theatre. Tynan wrote so beautifully and wittily and lovingly about the stage and the people who inhabit it and he was also responsible in a major way for the success of the National Theatre of Great Britain along with his friend and professional partner, Laurence Olivier. (an essay on Olivier is one of the high-points of this book.) It was Tynan who "discovered" Harold Pinter, who "made the career" of John Osbourne and was a major factor in reviving the career of Noel Coward, after years of neglect: as Literary Manager of the National, it was Tynan who urged a revival of Coward's classic "Hay Fever."This collection of 50 essays is absolutely essential reading for anyone who has a love of theatre or simply of celebrity and star power. No one writing today writes as well as Tynan did nor consistently shows his affection for Show Business. If you regularly read today's so-called critics, you come away with the feeling that they become INSULTED that plays they dislike were actually produced!I highly recommend this book. It is passionate, charming and, at times, really funny stuff. But, please, do yourself a favor and haunt every used book shop you know to find a copy of Tynan's out-of-print collected theatre reviews from the U.S. (he wrote for "The New Yorker") and England called CURTAINS. It is absolutely the best book of criticism you'll ever read.

Fireworks galore!

Tynan was one of the century's great journalists, capable of capturing a performer in two paragraphs, yet equally adept at longer essays, several of which are collected here. The pieces on Stoppard and Louise Brooks are particularly fine. The reviewer below is right: the writing is to die for; but, compared to Epstein, Tynan is a super-hevyweight, with ten times the force and prose-potency.

Brilliant and funny

Enormously entertaining and the writing is to die for. Epstein regards Tynan as a lightweight and in a way I guess he is, but a skilled lightweight is still a thing of beauty and Tynan IS skilled. I stared underlining favorite passages but had to stop because I was underlining almost everything.