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Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre is a substantial history of the origins of dramaturgs and literary managers. It frames the explosion of professional appointments in England within a wider continental map reaching back to the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century Germany, examining the work of the major theorists and practitioners of dramaturgy, from Granville Barker and Gotthold Lessing to Brecht and Tynan. This study positions Brecht's model of dramaturgy as central to the worldwide revolution in theatre-making practices, and it also makes a substantial argument for Granville Barker's and Tynan's contributions to the development of literary management. With the territories of play and performance-making being increasingly hotly contested, and the public's appetite for new plays showing no sign of diminishing, Mary Luckhurst investigates the dramaturg as a cultural and political phenomenon.

Peter Nichols's The National Health, the National Theatre's (NT) only popular success of 1969 and winner of that year's Evening Standard award for \"Best New Play,\" seems to have succeeded in spite of the efforts of Laurence Olivier, then the NT's artistic director, to keep it out of the public eye. Nichols's play, a profane and medically explicit view of a hospital ward with a cast of thirty, offered what Kenneth Tynan described as \"an anatomy of England.\" As such, it was an ideal test case for the NT's power and willingness to use its subsidy to stage challenging plays. This article examines the drawn-out, internal struggle over Health, drawing on previously unexamined material from the playwright's personal papers at the British Library, as well as original interviews with Nichols and director Michael Blakemore. It provides insight into the structure and policies of the NT during Olivier's directorship— in particular, Tynan's championing the play casts new light on his role within the NT management, while the play's scheduling difficulties reveal problems with large-scale repertory, which the NT continues to face.

(1927–80), dramatic critic, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He wrote for various papers, most influentially for the Observer

I was 20 when I met Ken Tynan. Spare Rib was on the eve of being launched and Ken, along with the likes of Michael White, Felix Topolski and Christopher Logue, turned up at some of our fundraising parties and dutifully wrote out cheques for pounds 10 or pounds 20 towards \"the cause\". I also shared a birthday with Tynan's daughter, Tracy, whose mother, Elaine Dundy, had written a favourite book of mine, The Dud Avocado . For although she's done her best like a brave gel and good trouper to cooperate with her husband's rosebud predilections, [Kathleen]'s heart, it is clear, fails both herself and her husband in Dr Thwackum mode. There is self-protection to consider, apart from anything else. Ken is not satisfied by the kind of naughty games from the suburbs that you might find recommended \"to spice up your sex life\" in Cosmo or its imitators. With his schoolmaster's cane - what else? - Ken seeks to take sadomasochism to the dangerous edge and beyond. Dundy, his first wife - another, at best, dilettante masochist - reported a week-long orgy and four canes broken. Words to inspire the spanking partner \"Nicole\", who is already on the Tynan scene when he first introduces her in the diary in May 1974. Nicole is no weekend hippy but a real pro, though one who doesn't initially require cash from Ken or her other lovers. For free, after a hot Indian dinner, she indulges him by \"injecting a large glass of vodka into my anus via an enema tube. Within 10 minutes the agony is indescribable . . .\" There follows a long weekend of lavatory visits. \"NB three days later I am still seeping blood.\"

East took dummy's diamond jack with his queen and cashed the club king. (Remember, lead king from ace-king and king-queen after trick one.) When West discouraged with his club three, East cashed the club ace and tried to take the setting trick with the diamond ace, but South ruffed.

In \"[Kenneth Tynan]: A Life,\" [Dominic Shellard] is at pains to remind us of his subject's achievements because, unfortunately, they became overshadowed by the embarrassments of his later life. Tynan fancied himself a sexual rebel, out to liberate humanity and shock the bourgeoisie. At his grammar school, he debated against the motion \"This House Thinks the Present Generation Has Lost the Ability to Entertain Itself\" by extolling masturbation. This is hilarious -- in a schoolboy. Tynan's naughtiness didn't age well. Even Playboy, for whom he wrote brilliantly on a number of show business and political subjects, turned down three articles on sex. Rejecting \"Meditations on Basic Baroque,\" a paean to the female rear end, the editors wrote, \"It seems to us to have an archness which is middle-aged.\" Yet Tynan himself had established the style for snottiness and personal attacks. He was famously rude, for example, about Laurence Olivier's wife, Vivien Leigh (gossips whispered \"Jealousy!\"). Oddly, Shellard sees Tynan as a bold and honest destroyer of a timidly genteel style of theater criticism, yet describes attacks on Tynan as \"vituperation.\" He can't have it both ways. Tynan created a style that was then used against him. Shellard wisely insists that Tynan's greatest contribution to English theater was his writing. It was in his reviews that Tynan tore down the fusty old house and suggested how a new one might be built. Make that \"must\" be built. Tynan was passionate, and if there's something tragic about his life it comes from his having given that passion to Art, which, in the usual way, neglected to reciprocate. A man who loved not wisely but too well.

With the publication of the remarkably frank and searching Life by his widow, Kathleen, and the subsequent appearance of his Letters and Diaries , and a memoir by his first wife, Elaine Dundy, he has become the best-known theatre critic who ever wrote. All this is just as Tynan would have wished. What would surely have surprised him is that, despite the availability of his dazzling collection of profiles, none of his critical work is in print: Tynan himself has eclipsed his work. This is a grievous loss for anyone remotely interested in theatre in the 20th century, or indeed in theatre tout court . It is the purpose of [Dominic Shellard]'s scholarly and rather sober book to focus attention again on what he feels is Tynan's real achievement. There is an obvious analogy here with the aspect of his life that has now become notorious, his addiction to sado-masochistic sex. The pain is not the point, Tynan argues, and anyway, it doesn't really hurt. Oh yes it did, says Dundy, whom he liked to cane, and oh yes it did, cry the many victims of his lashing prose. What is startlingly clear from Shellard's book is that the rift between Tynan's persona and his private longings grew increasingly difficult for him to bear. He needed to out himself in order to get a sense of his own reality, always an elusive matter with him. In his diary he notes: \"My persona and myself have never properly matched.\" Shellard's book admirably fulfils his intentions. Tynan the critic is thoroughly documented, and placed squarely in his times - perhaps too squarely: the text is filled with political and historical background where one sometimes loses sight of Tynan altogether. There is a disappointing lack of curiosity about his intellectual influences, not least his immersion in the work of CS Lewis, his kindly Oxford tutor. One would certainly like to know Tynan's views on The Problem of Pain .