What critic, dead or alive, wouldn’t want to be immortalized by the very medium they’ve written about? And what sane person would want their personal diaries splayed before the public eye, their private reflections open to evaluation by the world at large? Not even Kenneth Tynan, the late, trend-setting British theater and film critic, for all his avant-garde perception and penchant for irony, could have seen this coming. But that is precisely what Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers have done. They’ve cracked open a wide assortment of Tynan’s memoirs (as edited by John Lahr), and distilled down the juiciest of stories in “Tynan,” a 90-minute exploration into the psyche of one of the most colorful figures in theater society during the last century.
‘Tynan’
| On stage |
| Where: Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW |
| When: Through Feb. 6, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday; 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday matinee, 8 p.m. Feb. 1 |
| Info: $44.00 to $65.00; 202-332-3300, studiotheatre.org |
Both literary genius and sexual provocateur — he is credited with being the first to utter the F-word on national British television — Tynan was nearly legendary in his ability to make or break a show, script, director or actor in the London theater scene and later, abroad.
The Studio Theatre delivers Philip Goodwin as the sole purveyor of Tynan’s assertive charisma, doling out the kind of awkward chap you might not be so intimidated by after a pint or two. He’s equal parts miser and mischief, maven and melee, a ripe concoction of intellectual stimulus weighed down by physical and emotional burden. Though Tynan was a lifelong chain smoker, you won’t see Goodwin light up onstage — instead he wheezes through the latter years of Tynan’s fatal emphysema, a realistic affliction that only occasionally interrupts the proceedings.
Goodwin spends much of the evening seated in a large desk chair, center-stage. There is no set to speak of, unless you call that single chair a set, and there is no real action to speak of, either — just an evening of intimate anecdotes, ruminations and mostly bittersweet memories from Goodwin’s Tynan. Whether he is regaling stories of spanking his mistress or taking in an enema of vodka, Goodwin remains irrepressibly lucid, even as Tynan grows increasingly ominous and woefully suicidal, a victim of his own harsh assessment.
Yet what must have seemed thrillingly titillating and ambitiously scandalous in print doesn’t necessarily translate to a lively evening of theater. “Tynan” eventually unfolds as one enormous monologue of a show, not intriguing expose, with nary a wisp of a plot. It feels as though you’ve hopped on a giant hamster wheel of stories, mere scraps cobbled together from random journal entries during the last desperate decade of Tynan’s life. The problem isn’t Goodwin’s endless rambling, the issue here is that Nelson and Chambers give him such little leeway that it’s all a parallel cloud of gab — there are no segues or smooth transitions, just one long, relentless kaleidoscope of memory and self-flagellation. Perhaps Tynan would have wanted it that way.
