DESCRIBING THE NEW YORK drama critics' annual 'Awards' session in
the Manchester Guardian last week, Alastair Cooke stated that `Mr. Kenneth Tynan, the infant Dalai Lama of the European theatre, recently pronounced A Raisin in the Sun, the work of a twenty-eight-year-old negress, to be the best American play of the Broadway season . . . once he had spoken there was nothing much the resident prophets could do but go along with him.' This sounded like Kenneth Tynan, certainly. So did the arguments which the article went on to paraphrase. But later, Mr. Cooke began unaccountably to hedge: 'this might not be quite the way in which the poll was taken'; `it is hard to prise out the details'; and, finally, `for all I know Mr. Tynan sat below the salt at yesterday's table and probably did not presume to raise a whisper against the thunder of the local judges.' By this time I was beginning to wonder whether Kenneth Tynan had asserted himself or not; and I rang up a friend of his to find out. Apparently Kenneth Tynan was not at the Awards meeting at all : he was in Cuba at the time; and his vote was given by proxy. What was it that C. P. Scott said—'Facts are sacred, but fancy is free'?
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