BOOK REVIEW : Theater Critic Mirrors Himself : PROFILES<i> Selected and edited by Kathleen Tynan and Ernie Eban</i> Harper Perennial $14.95 paper; 437 pages

It may seem odd that the editors of a collection of profiles by the late Kenneth Tynan--possibly the best theater critic writing in English since George Bernard Shaw--would start with a couple of pieces he wrote for his school magazine.

Tynan’s youthful tribute to Orson Welles, for instance, is all velvet swatches of aged certitude--the kind that only adolescents can muster. Why reprint it? Perhaps to show what the grown-up Tynan could do in four words. In a subsequent Welles piece, he recalled his “tone of midget exhortation” in the King Edward’s School Chronicle.

As a critic, Tynan would swallow a production whole, make it thoroughly part of himself, and return it in glinting images--lethal or delighted--and some profoundly original thinking about what plays, playwrights, actors and directors can do.

“The secret of his freshness possibly lies in his boredom with anything that has ever been done before.” That is Tynan writing about Charles Laughton, but it could be Tynan writing about himself. Each time he went to see a play, it challenged both his hunger and his hunter’s instinct--not the same thing, since a hunter goes for the challenge as much as the meat.

Aside from reviews, Tynan did a great many profiles and sketches for such periodicals as Holiday, the Observer, Harpers Bazaar and the New Yorker. The hunger was less dependable because the occasions were. It was not the same thing to write about an actor because he was on stage and you went to challenge him, as to write about the same actor because he was in town and an editor was interested.

Arts journalism suffers a lot from flaccid occasions. Tynan suffered from them less than almost anyone else. Still, many of the pieces in this collection bear their marks: froth and routine seductiveness masking an uncertain level of desire. None of these things dates very well--juvenilia aside, these pieces were written between 1950 and 1980. All, except for the very slightest, have been collected previously.

The books are all out of print, though. And therefore, even if I think pruning would have been a good idea, this book is wonderful and necessary, because it is the only way a new reader can see how wonderful and necessary Tynan was and is (at least, until a projected three-volume collection of his criticism is published).

Theater is partly physical, and so was Tynan. Laughton used his mournful and wary bulk as his instrument. So Tynan rightly captured his grand style by calling him “the prodigal son bearing a strong resemblance to the fatted calf.”

Noel Coward, the brilliant but mannered and restricted ironist, is in Tynan’s words “the monocle of all he surveys.” Katharine Hepburn’s zest and irreverence “makes small, dry people shrivel.” Of Sir John Gielgud’s thrilling, autumnal voice: “The east wind has blown through it.”

Tynan was brought to New York to serve as the New Yorker’s drama critic. He was too much for Broadway; not because he was critical, but because he was so witty that he made it seem even more mediocre. He moved on to do some remarkable profiles.

Those on Mel Brooks and Tom Stoppard are richly and acutely detailed. The trouble is that both artists were so flamboyantly witty that they rather defeated Tynan’s own talents. It was like exhibiting a peacock against a peacock-feather drop-cloth; the bird turns wren-like.

Sir Ralph Richardson, blunt and evasive, down-to-earth and loony, was always one of Tynan’s best subjects; and his profile is a masterpiece. Tynan hunted him like some lumbering water buffalo that, just at the point of capture, turns chamois and bounds away.

Richardson could be the plebeian plumber, come to see about the drains. Interviewed by Samuel Beckett for the part of Estragon, he asked for explanations. “You see, I like to know what I’m being asked to do. March up the hill, charge that blockhouse.” Beckett retreated in wordless horror.

Yet, just as this pop-eyed beer barrel could come up quicksilver on the stage, so could his words. Tynan cited a BBC interview in which the old actor pottered vaguely about the studio--the cameras tracked him nervously--before sitting down and coming out with one of the best things ever said about acting:

“If you’re a writer or a painter, you write or paint whenever you want to. But we have to do this task at a precise moment. At three minutes past eight, the curtain goes up, and you’ve got to pretend to believe, because no one else will believe you unless you believe it yourself. A great deal of our work is simply making ourselves dream. That is the task. At three minutes past eight, you must dream.”

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “The Murderer Next Door” by Rafael Yglesias (Crown).