Theater As the Theory of Everything

The critic's love for theater is seldom reciprocated by the theater itself. Jan Kott's love for theater was generously reciprocated by the most significant Western directors of his time—Peter Brook, Giorgio Strehler, Ariane Mnouchkine—and a legion of lesser-known directors worldwide who felt inspired by his interpretation of Shakespeare and ancient tragedy.

Kott's unprecedented, sweeping influence on theatrical practice is truly startling, given his biography: growing up in Poland between the wars, surviving only by chance the persecution and atrocities of the Soviet and German occupations, writing under the watchful eye of Stalinist censorship. Moreover, he wrote exclusively in his mother tongue (even during his later years in America), not a common language but one in which he excelled stylistically.

The essays on Shakespeare, later so famous, were written in the fifties in a country with closed borders, concerned local productions (for example, "Hamlet after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party"), and could have easily remained a local phenomenon. But an energetic Polish publisher presented them in an English translation to British Methuen. Coming from a culture that under adverse conditions for theater had produced Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, Kantor, Grotowski, and Mrozek, Kott's conquest of the Western public is not entirely surprising.

On the contrary, theater practitioners' fascination with the critic Kott was based on his personality; on the way his experience of political terror and situations on the border between life and death gave his Shakespeare readings gravity and authenticity; and, last but not least, on the palpable brilliance of his style, even in translation. The authority of his war experience and the resonance of his prose made it easy to forget that his broadly stroked interpretation is reductive and in its darkness ignores Shakespeare's sunny side, his Renaissance optimism. Nevertheless, in Kott's sweeping theories everything was amplified: the "grand realism" of the classics (a hidden polemic against official socialist realism), the "grand mechanism of history" (the history plays), the grand existential despair of Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd. To him the facts were less important than the theories, and his overriding paradigm was "theater as theory for everything."

For him, life was theater and theater life. In his autobiography Still Alive he styled himself as an accidental survivor, and he certainly was one. Maybe his most astonishing success was that he managed to survive two atrocious occupations of his country with his "neck in a noose." In the course of a life reminiscent of a Chaplin movie, he escaped the Soviet Nagan pistol (murder as handicraft) and Hitler's crematories (industrialized murder). But the greatest (medical) miracle was his prolonged condition of still dying. For fifty years he lived with one lung, and over his last twenty years he survived five heart attacks; he wrote a suggestive account of his own clinical death ("the body falls away from the soul"). As with all his grand theories, this last one is difficult to verify and difficult to refute.

I came to know Jan Kott shortly after the war in Lodz, 1946. I was a beginning student of philosophy; he was a well-known cosmopolitan writer, a familiar feature in the literary clubs where the remains of the intellectual elite that survived the destruction of Warsaw mingled. He was considered a Marxist and an enthusiast for Poland's new system, which his prewar communist sympathies legitimated. He also became famous as a publicist of the belligerent literary magazine Kuznicaand a brilliant critic of literature, thanks to his book The School of the Classics, which we eagerly read. We admired and envied him.

But actually I knew Jan Kott without really knowing him until much later. When I read his autobiography prior to its publication, I discovered that we both frequented the same part of town in occupied Warsaw and that he and his wife sometimes found shelter in a conspiratorial apartment. Even though he was a "gentile and christened Jew" whose family had...