My Life in Pieces (4 page)

The final phrase of this sentence, if it does not summarise the whole of Tynan’s aspiration for the theatre, is certainly a vivid indication of what he expected out of it. His appetite for the stimulation that he felt the theatre could uniquely offer was immense, and informs all his criticism. He
needed
good theatre, as an addict craves his drug, as a starving man craves nourishment. This is what makes his reviews so urgent and so personal and quite unlike those of any other critic who has ever written. He announced his credo with absolute clarity: ‘The critic [has done his job] if he evokes, precisely and with all his prejudices clearly charted, the state of his mind after the performance has impinged upon it… he will find readers only if he writes clearly and gaily and truly; if he regards himself as a specially treated mirror recording a unique and unrepeatable event.’ Somewhat disingenuously, he claims that ‘the true critic cares little for the here and now… his real rendezvous is with posterity. His review is
better addressed to the future; to people thirty years hence who may wonder exactly what it felt like to be in a certain playhouse on a certain distant night.’ In reality, of course, his review can only tell us what it felt like to be Ken Tynan in a certain playhouse on a certain distant night; but that is more than enough when Ken Tynan is as interesting and perpetually interested as he was. It is equally disingenuous to pretend that he had no desire to influence his own times. On the contrary, his agenda in that regard was quite naked. He savagely attacked the institution of censorship in the form of the Lord Chamberlain (‘the ex-Governor of Bombay’, as he relentlessly calls him), the moribund West End, the perceived inadequacies of certain actors, the life-denying philosophy, as he saw it, behind the Theatre of the Absurd. He provoked mercilessly, and without regard to friendship. He caused much pain. The actor and director Sam Wanamaker was driven to great epistolary lengths to rebut Tynan’s wickedly negative account of one of his performances: ‘I will not accept and will fight against your almost psychopathic desire to denigrate me and my work,’ raged Wanamaker. ‘You have no real convictions except those of an avant-garde opportunist… you are a fraud as a critic and will never grow into a great one (which potential you have) until you develop humility and respect for honest work, integrity and sincerity… the most vitriolic piece of critical groin-kicking I have ever come across.’ Tynan was bewildered by this response, just as he failed to understand why Orson Welles didn’t welcome him backstage after he had reviewed Welles’s performance of Othello as ‘Citizen Coon’. He wanted to be a licensed jester in the Shakespeare manner, allowed to say the unsayable, to make the forbidden joke. He loved, he said,
testing
people; Dundy, in a marvellous phrase, alludes to his primary tactic: to ‘pour oil on troubled waters and then light it.’

To him it was all a game, a serious game, but a game nonetheless. There is an obvious analogy here with the aspect of his life that has now become notorious, his addiction to sadomasochistic sex. The pain is not the point, Tynan argues, and anyway, it doesn’t
really
hurt. Oh yes it did, says Elaine 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 rapidly grew to the point that it was increasingly difficult for him to sustain. He needed to out himself in order to get a sense of his own reality, always an elusive matter with him. ‘You are the only proof that I exist,’ he told Dundy during
one of their many separations; in his diary he notes ‘My persona and myself have never properly matched.’ After leaving the National he persistently tried to produce a film about his erotic tastes; in his erotic revues,
Oh! Calcutta!
and
Carte Blanche
, he attempted to persuade his collaborators to include sketches celebrating them. Rather riskily, he even makes an allusion in a jolly letter to Laurence Oliver thanking him for securing his severance pay for him, among the beneficiaries of which will be ‘Miss Floggy’s finishing school in Maida Vale’. Shellard does not seek to psychoanalyse Tynan, but this is all pretty standard textbook stuff: he grew up not knowing that he was the illegitimate son of a father who had an entirely separate family elsewhere, and that his very existence was a secret. He felt all his life the compulsion to share the secret, and to announce and re-announce his existence to the world at large, obsessed with greatness (‘that inner uproar’) in others.

Apart from theatre, music was the great passion of my life, although I was
quite slow in discovering music theatre. Everything in my grandmother’s
house revolved around music; there was music to get up to, music to eat to,
above all music to drink to, mostly provided by the radio, but for special
occasions there was the collection of a hundred or so shellac records,
scratched, cracked, bitten into. On what must in that early stereophonic
era have been one of the last fully functioning 78 rpm radiograms, we
untiringly listened to them. Most of them were of operatic arias, almost
without exception from the Italian verismo repertory, and of these, more
than ninety per cent were from operas by Puccini. A remarkably large
number of them were tenor arias; Gigli – seen in the substantial flesh
from the gods at Covent Garden by my mother and aunt in the late Thir
ties – was the presiding genius, his caressing liquidness swooned over, his
sobs sobbed along with. Di Stefano and the briefly famous Luigi Alva were
similarly lauded for their sweetness, while for heft, Björling was the man,
‘Nessun Dorma’ and ‘Ch’ella Mi Creda Libero’ thrilled to over and over.
My aunt was quite frank about the sexually stirring effect of those Nordic
high Cs flung out like javelins. ‘Oomph!
Gorgeous
. Let’s hear it again!’
Sopranos were less loved; the house diva was plump-toned Joan Hammond
– ‘Ah, love me a li-toll’ – while Callas – briefly heard on the radio – was
despised
. ‘Ugly, ugly, ugly.’ Baritones were rare: I can recall only Tito
Gobbi; non-operatic Gobbi, actually:
The Legend of the Glass Mountain.
But it was Gobbi, as it turned out, who fixed for ever in my mind the ideal
of what opera might be. In
Opera and Me
, written for the
Independent
in 1995, to coincide with my production of
Il Trittico
at Broomhill, I
explain how.

It must have been 1965. A Friday night. Two school chums and I were wandering about the centre of town as we usually did at the end of the school week, on a sort of tea-crawl from one Joe Lyons to another, gossiping, dreaming, showing off, smoking furiously, when we happened to drift into Floral Street, down by the Royal Opera House, past the entrance to the gallery. People were filing in; idly I glanced at the poster and saw that they were doing something called
Il Trittico
. Never heard of it. ‘It’s by Puccini,’ I suddenly noticed. ‘Never heard of him,’ my chums said. I scorned their ignorance. Then I saw that Tito Gobbi was singing in it; had indeed directed it, whatever it was. That settled it. ‘We have to see this,’ I said. They were aghast. We were not what you might call theatregoers at the best of times: and were we now going to submit to an evening of foreign yowling written by one unknown wop, starring another? Somehow I swung it, we paid our three shillings and we found ourselves in the slips, hanging suicidally through the bars at right angles to the stage like three culture-loving gargoyles.

The first shock was the sound. I’d never been to a concert, never (apart from my grandmother) heard a live singing voice, and by that marvellously democratic trick of the architects of the Opera House, here, clinging to the rafters, we were exposed far more vividly to the full glory of that swelling, complex orchestra bringing Paris to life than were the toffs sitting a hundred miles below. The voices seemed only a yard away. The physical impact of Gobbi’s voice was sensational, his unmistakable tone, here, in the first of the three operas,
Il Tabarro
, hardened to reveal the bargee’s bitterness, frustration and despair. It was completely direct: like someone talking to you, someone you knew inside out. I had not heard this before: Björling was always Björling, Gigli always Gigli. They were the noise they made. This was different: a character, a human being. I risked decapitation or at the very least traction as I strained for a glimpse of the physical embodiment of this person so far only heard, not seen. There, finally, at the centre of the grim stage picture, was a man wearing a polo-neck jumper, rough trousers and jacket and some kind of a cap, a
man who might have just come off the street. But one was riveted by this ordinary man; the impacted force of his pain sucked you into him. Suddenly, shockingly, by some turn of the head which seemed wholly natural, his eyes would rake the auditorium and you saw the anguish through them as clearly as if you had X-rayed his heart. Puccini’s unforgiving, unrelenting river welled up and up and with it my tears.

The interval was a little embarrassing, me snuffling, them bored. The chums had not been having the best time; we went off and smoked passionately then returned for more, they somewhat as if they were about to settle in for double maths. There’s no point now in my pretending that I enjoyed
Sister Angelica
any more than they did though at the time I worked myself up into some sort of synthetic ecstasy. For Catholic schoolboys to spend an unrelieved fifty-three minutes with twenty nuns
after
school stretched aesthetic aspiration to breaking point, and anyway, where were the tunes? After the next interval and five more cigarettes each, they decided that it could only get worse and jacked it in. I stubbornly stayed, and so set my life on its future course.

I had been totally unprepared for Gobbi’s comic genius. That the granite figure of
Il Tabarro
should within an hour or so be replaced by this gargoyle, tip-nosed, rubber-mouthed, agile as a monkey, was, and is, uncanny. What was going on around him on stage and in the pit was pretty lively too, but he positively became the music, mercurially transforming himself from bar to bar. He seemed constantly to take – and I do not doubt did take – his fellow singers by surprise, an anarch at the centre of things, pure energy, only finally coming to seem benevolent in time for Schicchi’s final address to the audience, and then only temporarily. Simply the thing he was, made him live.

Well, this was IT. I rushed home to proclaim the new gospel. Björling and Gigli, brassy top Cs and creamy cavatinas OUT; character in music and music in action IN. With cruel indifference to the feelings of those with whom I had but days before sobbed and cooed over the old discs, I found a new mentor. I disappeared for long periods to my best friend Billy Brown’s next door. His father Andrew was my guru. He seemed to have stepped out of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale: nearly seventy then, a violinist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, but also a student of the Koran, a practitioner of yoga, a brewer of mead, a painter, a clockmaker and a reconstructor of ancient instruments. And all this in Streatham. At
my urgent demand he regaled us, Billy and me, from his vast experience of playing in orchestra pits since the early Twenties, with the stories of the operas. Not perfunctorily: he described the characters, explained their predicaments. Nobody could have done it more vividly. No opera producer could have conveyed the story as simply, as powerfully. Operas, he made clear, were simply plays told in music. I understood.

Shellac was out, now. I put together a gramophone from various spare pieces; then began my love affair with vinyl as I discovered not golden gobbets but whole operas. The sequence, I found, was everything. When I first heard the chain of two arias and a duet at the end of the first act of
La Bohème
together instead of separately, I thought I’d explode (as I must say I have thought I’d explode on every subsequent hearing). There was no end it seemed to the territories in this new universe. With Stephen Williams’s masterful
Come to the Opera
as my vade mecum, I more or less moved in to Sadler’s Wells, where the entire repertory crammed itself onto that unaccommodating stage: operettas, early Verdi, Britten, Kurt Weill, Janáček, Thea Musgrave. I could see that the productions were somewhat hastily put together, that the chorus were barely numerous enough to do what was called of them – in
The Flying Dutchman
the sailors were unmistakably running round the back of the stage to take their place at the end of the rope again. But what the hell. Norman Bailey was singing Daland, for goodness’ sake, Rita Hunter was Senta. Then after some years came the staggering culmination of everything everyone – Lilian Baylis, Tyrone Guthrie, Constant Lambert, Colin Davis and indeed the audience, because we felt ourselves part of the Wells – had worked for, the monumental evening when the Sadler’s Company and the Wells Company joined forces to mount
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
on that impossibly tiny stage, Reginald Goodall weaving his immense gold-threaded tapestry in the pit, every strand clear, the whole picture radiant, while all those singers whom we had watched and relished, who had grown in artistic stature from performance to performance as we watched them, were now constituted into the noblest thing the theatre has to offer: a great ensemble, integrated yet individuated, a living organism, a huge celebration of human life.

In fact, opera was rather closer to home than theatre. This is the first part
of
Opera and Me.

Opera was in the air from the very beginning. My grandmother had been a singer. Never fully professional, she was a member of that substantial army of part-timers who, before and after the First World War, sang for private gatherings, above all for those mysterious events,
Masonics
. The zenith of her career had been public, however: at the great Peace Concert at the Albert Hall in 1919, she had sung ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, under the shamelessly allusive name of Vera Melbourne, with such unbridled fervour that the acoustical apparatuses had shattered. Even in her sixties when I first knew her, the voice was huge and rich, almost uncomfortably so at close quarters, as she crooned for my personal pleasure those Masonic favourites ‘Down in the Forest’ by Sir Landon Ronald, or Teresa del Riego’s ‘Homecoming’. Droopy pieces, they seemed to me; better by far was her
pièce de résistance
, ‘Softly Awakes My Heart’ from
Samson et
Dalila
, produced at the climax of the Friday evenings at my grandmother’s house which, awash with booze and racy talk, were such a feature of my childhood. Slowly (good living and phlebitis having taken their toll over the years) she would make her way around the room, inhabiting the sinuous curve of the melody, pausing to address each male in her path, boldly locking her eyes with his. She sang it quite wonderfully, sexily, dangerously. All her bulk and all her years disappeared and we all of us, her silent partners, felt a little hotter under our collars as she sang to us, us alone, excluding all the others.