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The Shock of the Vernacular: Wh-Clefts in Kenneth Tynan's Theatre Criticism
In May 1956, writing in the Sunday pages of The Observer, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan reviewed a play that permanently shattered the polite, drawing-room complacency of British drama: John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" at the Royal Court Theatre. Confronted by Jimmy Porter's raw working-class fury, older establishment critics recoiled in distaste, dismissing the production as vulgar self-pity. Tynan recognised that this theatrical rupture demanded an equally aggressive prose style. To dramatise the play's transformative cultural significance, he deployed the wh-cleft, or pseudo-cleft construction. By packaging whole propositions into nominalized relative clauses ("What Osborne has done is..."), Tynan built acute rhetorical anticipation before dropping his revolutionary aesthetic judgments.
The grammatical mechanics of the wh-cleft permitted Tynan to separate background consensus from polemical revelation.