Coffee-Table Notes

Theatre criticism, as this long neglected and often plagiarised collection by the man considered to be its greatest 20th century exponent makes plain, is far from what it used to be. In these days of the quick-fix sound-bite, if Kenneth Tynan had continued his tenure beyond the 12 years he blazed a trail through British, then world theatre as an arbiter of taste at a crucial time in post World War Two history, what he would have made of the current state of play in the information age is anybody’s guess. Outside of cinema, after all, there was little popular culture to entertain Tynan’s fancy, let alone write about, and today’s equivalent, one suspects, would be as equally well-versed in Buffy The Vampire Slayer as with Hamlet or King Lear. Then again, the narrow cultural canvas he drew upon left Tynan spoiled. Arriving on the scene from Cambridge in that prissy and already anachronistic no-man’s-land where what he dubbed the ‘Loamshire’ play – cut-glass country-house set thrillers t...

The recent death of former Edinburgh Royal Lyceum Theatre director Clive Perry, alongside The Citizens Theatre’s revival of Roddy McMillan’s 1973 play, The Bevellers, highlighted how appallingly Scotland’s theatrical history has been archived. Major plays have simply been lost, while pivotal figures have been airbrushed from the annals. While such deficiencies are barely addressed in both these vital documents concerning two such major operators, they are nevertheless key documents of how contemporary theatre has developed over the last half-century in a hotbed of political and social change reflected, not just in its artistic concerns, but in the very modus operandi of directors Max Stafford-Clark and Bill Bryden. Cutting his teeth at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in the late 1960s led Stafford-Clark directly to the collective working practises of Joint Stock in the early 1970s. The frustrating mechanics of existing within the status quo while remaining ideologically opposed to it ma...