KENNETH TYNAN was the greatest theatre critic of the 20th century. Flamboyant, witty and waspish, in the 1950s, he championed what became known as kitchen-sink drama, was literary manager of the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier, created the sexually explicit review Oh! Calcutta! and was the first person to utter the “f-word” on British TV.

Now Corin Redgrave will portray Tynan in a one-man Royal Shakespeare Company show, based on his diaries. It will preview at the Arts Theatre in the West End tomorrow and runs until March 26.

The 2001 publication of the diaries — which span 1971 to 1980, just before his death — revealed the most controversial aspect of his kaleidoscopic persona: his addiction to sadomasochism.

During marriage to his first wife, the American author Elaine Dundy, his persistent attempts to embroil her in his sexual predilections led to their divorce. It was only after he married his second wife, Kathleen Horton, then took a mistress — a former convent schoolgirl — that he was able to indulge fully his appetite for sadomasochistic sex.

The lurid details of Tynan’s affair with his mistress, to whom he gives the pseudonym Nicole, are in the diaries, as is the story of his relationships with Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and his personal struggle since he was a child, born the bastard son of Sir Peter Peacock, the mayor of Warrington.

On his deathbed, when he was 53 and dying of emphysema, Tynan bequeathed the diaries to his eldest daughter by Dundy, Tracy, asking her to have them published in their entirety.

Tracy, 52, a designer who has designed the costumes for the Tynan play, has lived in Los Angeles since the mid-1970s, is married to Jim McBride, a film director, and is relatively comfortable in her role as keeper of the Tynan flame.

She says: “My father wanted to shock people; he wanted to ruffle feathers, and he took pleasure in doing so. He was a narcissistic man, more of a pal than a father.”

Her 21st birthday party — held at the Young Vic and attended by A. J. Ayer, Frankie Howerd, Lauren Bacall, Lord and Lady Harlech, Eric Morecambe, Liza Minnelli and Peter Sellers — epitomised both Tynan’s obsession with celebrity and his idiosyncratic style of fathering.

“The party was more my father’s birthday party than mine,” she recalls. “Max Wall entertained, Dudley Moore played the piano, and I didn’t know half the people. My father and I sat in the circle and snorted cocaine together.”

Kenneth Tynan grew up the adored son of a mother who ended her life in a mental institution, and at times he tried to play the conventional father to Tracy.

“When I was six, I ‘mooned’ a group of girls, which I found hysterically funny. My father sat me down in the living room and said, ‘Sex is a wonderful thing, but you mustn’t lift your knickers up in the street.’ I didn’t know what sex was and I was puzzled.”

Soon, though, she became exposed to her father’s lurid sexual likings, which he would later characterise as a philosophy and a lifestyle.