Loud Conversations with Jan Kott

He wasn't easy to know, and I can say that in his brief moment as a visiting professor at the Yale School of Drama in those crucial sixties, I never came to know him. As associate dean—also a brief moment—I was assigned to guide him to his classroom, leave him there to his own devices, and then hope for the best. It was plain enough by then that his mangled English might put a crimp in the proceedings, and sure enough, students quickly pursued me to report that they simply couldn't understand his lectures, even though they were reasonably certain that he was bringing them analytic news they needed to hear. To the students I counseled patience; to Kott I suggested a slower pace in the vain hope that the wisdom of his essays could crash through the mashed words and garbled syntax. He kept trying, but he was still years away from the clarity he would one day find in American classrooms.

The real problem, I suspect, was in the leaps more than the words: Kott's criticism, always outside scholarly boundaries, made connections that couldn't have come from any other mind. He goes to a rehearsal of As You Like It with an all-male cast, notices the "ambiguity of gender and the ambivalence of desire," and in the next paragraph finds himself at the Kabuki wondering about "a geisha's lover ... in mortal danger." Or in one miraculously personal shift of consciousness, he sees Orgon and Tartuffe needing "a grimace from the other," with Orgon finally alone, fakery no longer possible—"all his faces have fallen off"—which brings Kott abruptly to that first year at Yale, living in a college guest suite and attending the Friday night mixer. There he sees girls changed to Dates, bringing "sex along with them, putting on sex like sweaters and bell-bottomed pants because dates must be sexy." As for the boys, "they lost all their charm, simplicity, and freshness; grimacing, they reacted to the artificial female faces with even more artificial male faces." Having invented the idea of grimacing as a need in a play without such a stage direction, Kott tries to illuminate the moment with an almost outlandish modern image. All this is part of his natural playfulness, which more often than not turns on the dime of sexuality: the image sees through Tartuffe's charm to its core in artifice; meanwhile, there's the hapless Orgon, bereft of simple means, an overgrown teenager embarrassed by his own insincerity.

Kott travels between text and performance with a tenacity borne from his conviction that theatrical text scarcely exists without the stage. Of Gloucester's scene on the cliffs of Dover, Kott sees instantly that there can be "only the parable of suicide as in medieval morality plays." Gloucester will never jump because "there is no hill, there are only the illusions of the blind old man," there is only a bare stage, and "the cliffs are created only by words." So certain is Kott of theatrical reality that he utterly rejects "literary criticism without regard to its theatrical particularization," calling it "poor and inadequate." By now, much of his work looks like gallant tilting at windmills, but it's easy to forget that Kott was a pioneer Quixote, making such genuine experiment safe for less courageous travelers.

It helped to be a fugitive from Eastern Europe after the war who couldn't help running his thoughts through the prism of an abyss that, after all the catastrophes, looked like a permanent condition. With hindsight, it can seem as if Peter Brook was always waiting for Kott to nudge him into the idea of Lear as an early Beckett play. Something had to be done to recover a sense of reality from the classical sludge decorating so many old plays, and Kott was there to do it, even finding in Beckett a truly realistic dramatist—realism defined, that is, as...