Theatre Notebook: 1947-1967 by Jan Kott (review)

BOOK REVIEWS THEATRE NOTEBOOK: I947-Ig07, by Jan Kott, translated from the Polish by Boleslaw Taborski. Doubleday & Company, Garden City, 1968, 268 pp. $5.95. Jan Kott's latest book provides a fascinating, provocative, and yet frustrating experience for its reader. Theatre Notebook is precisely what its title declares it to be, a notebook, a collection of essays written for a variety of occasions over a period of twenty years. These individual articles cover a wide gamut of theatrical experience. The major bulk of them is comprised of analyses and reviews of works and performances in the Polish Theatre and, as such, give us an excellent overview of the contemporary Polish Theatre and its drama. Through his catholic comparisons we are enabled to see the relationship which this theater holds to the major movements of the post-war theater in general. The remainder of the book deals with individual performances as diverse as Chinese opera and a recent production of Moliere's L'Ecole des femmes in Tunis. However, despite the fact that the book is an assemblage of essays written over a wide space of years, Theatre Notebook does not assume a random shape. The work has a consistent and significant focus as the perceptive remarks of an imagination which has a clear understanding of the nature of the theatrical event and a commitment to the possibility of the theater as a means of making us more human. Kott's search for relevance in the terms of our own times is clear in his provocative Shakespeare Our Contemporary. That demand is also present in this book in its persistent aim to understand the human content of each dramatic work discussed . Kott frequently cuts through the multi-layers of conventional interprettion to what appears to be the essential substance of a play, and in a brief statement he can reveal a great deal. However, the form of the essays is basically journalistic and here rests the cause of a reader's frustration. However brilliant and perceptive the essays are, they remain suggestive and not conclusive because of their brevity and their facile but somehow fragmentary analysis. Certain of these brief but challenging essays should be noted individually. The paired essays on Diirrenmatt's The Visit and Romulus the Great are among the finest discussions of this playwright which are available. The article titled "An Unexpected Racine" discusses Phedre as the exploration of the heroine's own guilt in a human condition in which not only her love but every love is a sin. The analysis of the prose version of the Oedipus of Sophocles is controversial in its fareedom to bandon the verbal poetry of the play; but the discussion of the prose performance in Warsaw as a demonstration of its modernity is keen in its response to the tragedy, especially in the tension between the demands of the Chorus and the demands of Oedipus. Kott speaks of the "inner contradictions tearing this tragedy apart," and finds that there are two tragedies operative: the tragedy of piety experienced by the Chorus and the tragedy of the confrontation of the truth experienced by Oedipus himself. "A Note on Beckett's Realism" is a short chapter which discusses Happy Days. Here Kott talks about the precise and definable realism which can be found in Beckett's plays and discusses the relationship between this realism and the kind 210 1969 BOOK REVIEWS 211 of abstraction which is typically Beckett's. The tension in Beckett between the concrete and the abstract is clearly at the heart of Beckett's own dramatic form. and Kott's brief remarks are again revealing. The final chapter, "Theatre and Literature," is an excellent general treatment of the debt which contemporary drama owes to Joyce and Kafka. The final pages deal with the ambiguity of mimesis itself and discuss Artaud in a clearer and more useful way than in any other essay which I have read. This chapter, as well, illustrates the basic limitation of the book. Extended and made more inclusive, it could become one of the most important analytic works in the criticism of modern drama; but, instead, it puts forward a significant insight or important relationship...