Style
A Resounding Tinkle typifies Simpson’s aversion to plot and establishes his talent for memorable one-liners and non-sequiturs. As with all of his subsequent work, the play demands absolutely straight delivery from actors. Such an approach fosters a conviction within the audience that the characters are living in a form of reality, where the formation of a government can be arranged via door-to-door enquiries. The extraordinary and impossible are treated as perfectly rational everyday events. This comic balance is recognised as a major influence on the early work of Peter Cook, particularly the E. L. Wisty monologues.
Many comparisons have been drawn to the work of key absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco. However, Simpson denies any link, adding that he had never even heard of the writer when he commenced a career in nonsense. In his own view, the valid literary parallels are with Lewis Carroll, James Thurber and P. G. Wodehouse.
Simpson’s early work must also be viewed in its cultural context. BBC Radio’s The Goon Show was widely admired, bringing surrealism to the masses for the first time. Plays such as A Resounding Tinkle arguably gentrified the idiom for London’s theatregoers, and with them the highbrow elite.
Read more about this topic: N. F. Simpson
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind.... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
“The old saying of Buffon’s that style is the man himself is as near the truth as we can get—but then most men mistake grammar for style, as they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)