Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth Tynan

Tynan’s jab lands because it flatters the critic while quietly raising the bar to an almost accusatory height. “Perceives what is happening” sounds like baseline competence: you can describe the new plays, clock the acting styles, note the fashionable themes. It’s journalism with a seat at opening night. The twist is the second sentence, where the critic stops being a reporter of culture and becomes an auditor of its absences.

“What is not happening” is Tynan’s real subject: the unrealized forms, the unspoken politics, the risks a theatre scene refuses to take. In mid-century British theatre, that refusal was palpable. Before the so-called “angry young men” cracked open the drawing-room tradition, the stage often performed a kind of national self-editing, keeping class conflict, sexual candor, and postwar disillusionment tidily offstage. Tynan, who championed the shock of the new and helped make controversy a tool of renewal, is arguing that criticism should name not only the hits but the voids: the playwrights not programmed, the accents not heard, the bodies not shown, the ideas producers deem too costly or impolite.

The line also carries a warning about critics themselves. It’s easy to mistake the dominant mood of an era for the whole of it, to take the theatre’s menu as proof of the audience’s appetite. Great criticism, Tynan suggests, requires counterfactual imagination: a sense of what could be onstage if fear, money, tradition, or censorship weren’t quietly running the show. That’s less review-writing than cultural diagnosis, and it explains why Tynan’s kind of critic so often becomes a threat to the very institutions that invite him in.