For the rest of his schedule he resided in Birmingham as common-or-garden Peter Tynan, Consort of the future critic’s mother. His daughter Tracy believed that his compulsive need to have a separate ongoing relationship with Nicole repeats the double life led by his father who divided his week and his personality into two mutually oblivious strands. From Monday to Wednesday, this figure was Sir Peter Peacock, a well-respected local politician and sometime Mayor of Warrington. Tynan’s financial debts were such that he couldn’t afford not to write, but he couldn’t write without smoking and he couldn’t both smoke and live – an asphyxiatingly vicious circle.Strange reiterated patterns abound in Tynan’s career.

The demobbed nabob’s life became split between his spouse, Kathleen, and Nicole, a fellow spanking addict. Eventually, his congenital emphysema – and the predictable British backlash against a maverick who gave the word “fuck” its television debut – drove the great man into Californian exile Not so much eyeless in Gaza as breathless in Santa Monica. Behind Olivier’s back, the board of the National Theatre appointed Peter Hall as artistic director designate in 1973 and it was immediately clear that Tynan would not be welcome in the new regime – indeed, his departure was one of the principal conditions of the Hall package And partly, his difficulties had a psycho-sexual basis. His was a career that was nothing if not glittering and iconic.

But then, for reasons that are depressingly implicit in some of the above, the life of Kenneth Peacock Tynan (1927-80) began to unravel.
Partly, his difficulties were political in origin. He’d gone on to be the first – and highly influential – literary manager of Laurence Olivier’s new National Theatre, where (among many other things) he’d nurtured the talents of the young Tom Stoppard and campaigned with incisive eloquence for the abolition of stage censorship – a goal eventually achieved in 1968. For a heady (if brief) period from 1952 to 1963, he’d established himself as the greatest critic of the English stage since George Bernard Shaw, and he spoke with the voice of his generation when he lavished praise on John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Even as an undergraduate, he’d deployed self-promotion techniques (camera-unctuous birthday boat trips down the Thames) that now look like early portents of our own celebrity culture. He had been the dandy king of post-war Oxford – a latter-day Wilde who cocked a ferociously effete snook at the drab decencies of those austere times, while clad in the kind of costuming (cloak with blood-red lining; gold shirts; bottle-green suits, etc) not normally associated with heterosexual boys just up from Birmingham.

Currently, she’s doing a two-month sold-out run of Hedda Gabler at Paris’s Od?, in a warehouse space on the northern edge of town. It’s an elusive deconstructed Ibsen, played on a vast stage resembling a Japanese lacquered platform. With the cavernous venue making it difficult to see Huppert’s facial expressions, her Hedda is not easily fathomed. Her playing is by turns declamatory, abrasive and mannered, with Huppert striking odd static poses, freezing like a totem pole. The point, perhaps, is to give us Hedda not as a person but as a series of versions of a person: about another play, Huppert once commented that she enjoyed “being in relation with a multiplicity of states of myself, rather than playing a character”.