Get the Ricochet app
Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.
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. People whom my mother met, at greater or lesser length: Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Philip. Princess Alexandra. The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. I forgot about them.
Discussion (14)
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Well, after all she married the Gagara Yasin. One would expect the extraordinary to be commonplace for one such as her, rolling off her like rain rolling off of a duck's back.
She probably met Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia back there somewhere.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
She, please do write a book on all this. I am willing to put in for the deluxe first edition, signed and with knit cover.
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
On the other hand, some are both artist and critic.
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Very true. I don't think it happens often that a person is good at both.
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
She probably did. Unfortunately, by the end of her life, she wouldn't have remembered. Not like Auntie Betty, whose social circle grew wider and more elevated the older and woollier she got. For the last few years of her life (these would be the years between, say, ages 99 and 102), she carried on a torrid romance with her boyfriend John, the King of China. Chagrined that he didn't come to her 100th birthday party, she broke things off with him at the urging of the wonderful people at her care home, who told her that if he couldn't be bothered to attend, he wasn't worth her time and attention. But she resumed the relationship shortly thereafter, and it lasted until her death, just a few weeks before her 103rd birthday.
Thanks for this lovely comment!
You're seeing five of 14 comments. Sign in, or join for just $5 per month, to read them all and add your own.