HARRY KLYNN / The resourceful oxfly

Harry Klynn is a popular artist, in the sense that his performing and writing style has wide acceptance and great appeal. But this does not make him any less of an intellectual. His intentions are clear, right from the start, his goal specific. He works with his means, choosing carefully his forms of expression and leads his audience. He is not just a populist reflecting the public taste. There lies his difference from the usual pseudo intellectuals in this business: Harry Klynn uses the ancient, well tested, method of old Socrates, irony and dialectics. He pretends to be naοve, he wonders, he leads the public to a dead end and then unfolds with them the skein of life, hidden and trapped in misinformation, propaganda, trends or habit. He is like an oxfly clinging to the back of authority forcing her to give up her indolence and reveal her horns and kick.

The most frequent mistake of pseudo intellectuals is that they consider themselves smarter than their audience and show it. Harry Klynn owes a lot to his years in the American underground cabarets and music halls which usually fed upon the anger of the suppressed minorities (Jews, blacks, Latin Americans) of the American intellectuals.

His humour’s recipe includes a lot of despair ( the scent of irony), plenty of sarcasm (sarcasm to himself as well, which makes it convincing to the others), and plenty of demonic madness, utopic arbitrariness and anarchic euphoria. Harry Klynn gave Greek citizenship to this admirable recipe. His rhythm, his pauses, his gestures, his joyous face have been recorded as part of the Greek acting history and surpass it  at the same time, by keeping a critical stand against it. Every one of his performances is a political, cultural, as well as artistic comment. Harry Klynn is not an opportune, occasional or exploitable product. He has developed his own personal style through much toil, hard work and careful selection between numerous attempts and variations. He is formed of the most solid materials, with their warrantor being his experience, his knowledge and most important, the sixth sense he possesses, and which has proved to be the lifejacket of every major popular artist. In Harry Klynn’s case this fifth sense comprises of his unique ability to perceive what is crucial in all aspects of life and charge it politically.

This procedure presupposes an interest in public matters  and Klynn can function at any moment as a responsible citizen in the Municipality. People aspiring to write satire have a lot to learn by Harry Klynn’s conscientious intervention in the political and social process. While analyzing his code, they will understand that obscenity can be a most useful weapon when it comes to satire. Especially when Harry Klynn is concerned, since he swears  in anger, thus finding the sentimental equivalent to the offense he has received. Citizen Klynn’s harsh language depicts the abundance of his love and pain. He does not revel in this vulgarity and does not flatter the scurrilous origins of our contemporary, petty bourgeois prudery. He is ashamed of having to resort to obscenities, ashamed that he is forced to go to such extremes.

And of course this bawdy talk is not uncontrolled. Klynn resolves this matter (which has troubled a lot, serious and ridiculous moralists) in favour of art, of the genre’s tradition and freedom of criticism. Satire and her means of expression are justified when their goal is true.

Kostas Georgousopoulos / Theatre Critic 
December 16th, 1985