About the highest tribute I can pay N. F. Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle … is to say that it does not belong in the English theatrical tradition at all. It derives from the best Benchley lectures, the wildest Thurber cartoons, and the cream of the Goon Shows. It has some affinities with the early revues of Robert Dhéry and many more with the plays of M. Ionesco. In English drama it is, as far as I know, unique. It is also astonishly funny…. (p. 198)

To sustain anarchic humour for a full evening is among the hardest things a playwright can attempt. Once having espoused the illogical, the irrelevant, the surreal, he is committed: a single lapse into logic, relevance, or reality, and he is undone. A playwright of Mr. Simpson's kind comes defenceless to the theatre. He has voluntarily discarded most of the dramatist's conventional weapons. He can have no plot, since plots demand logical development. Lacking a plot, he can make no use of suspense, that miraculous device which, by focusing our attention on what is going to happen next, prevents us from being intelligently critical of what is happening now. Mr. Simpson can never free-wheel like that. At every turn he must take us by surprise. His method must be a perpetual ambush. All playwrights must invent, but he must invent incessantly and unpredictably. It is the only weapon left him—he is otherwise naked. As naked, perhaps, as a British Foreign Secretary without an H-bomb; yet unilateral disarmament, even in the theatre, is an extremely disarming thing. At least, the audience seemed to find it so. (pp. 198-99)

[A Resounding Tinkle] is a revolutionarily funny piece of work. In a programme note Mr. Simpson declares his indebtedness to the simple fact that the earth, given luck, can support life for another twelve hundred thousand years. How, for so long, are we to keep ourselves amused? This is the problem that faced the tramps in Waiting for Godot. An astonished patience is Mr. Simpson's answer, as he implies when one of the Comedians doubts the audience's ability to sit through a play full of pauses and the other replies by asking him whether he has ever complained of buying a sponge full of holes.

I prefer Mr. Simpson's assumption, which is that we are all on the brink of boredom, to that of most comic writers, which is that we are all on the brink of hilarity. Bro Paradock … is a splendidly sour creation, drab, leather-elbowed, and disgruntled, comic because he reacts with no surprise to circumstances of absolute fantasy. Neither he nor his wife, Middie …, is perturbed when their Uncle Ted turns out to be a woman; and he has nothing but quiet scorn for the man who calls and asks him, at six o'clock in the evening, to form a Government. (As he says, that's the Prime Minister's job.)

About a fifth of Mr. Simpson's family portrait is voulu, polysyllabic, and of a determined quaintness. The rest is pure plutonium, by which I mean something that is rarer than gold. (pp. 199-200)

Kenneth Tynan, "The British Theatre: 'A Resounding Tinkle'" (1957), in his Curtains: Selections from the Drama Criticism and Related Writings (copyright © 1961 by Kenneth Tynan; reprinted with the permission of Kathleen Tynan and Paradise Films), Atheneum, 1961, pp. 198-200.