THE THEATRE OF ESSENCE
By Jan Kott, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill. 218 pp, $9.95 paper.
I recall a lecture 10 years ago, at which the Polish stage director Jerzy Grotowski described a paratheatrical ritual of his devising. Participants were to climb up a mountain for a full day, reach the top by nightfall and then meet around a campfire. “The Flame on the Mountain,” as Grotowski called it, was to provide a mystical communion that conventional plays could not. Jan Kott, the theatre critic, was sitting in the audience during the lecture, but before long he had moved up to the speaker’s podium to ask Grotowski some rather Puckish questions.
“Suppose I drove a car up to the top of the mountain. Would it be the same experience?” he queried. He went on: Was such an expedition really necessary? After all, one had only to stand up at this very podium to get close to Grotowski, to attain his height.
Kott’s new collection of essays, The Theatre of Essence, continues his irreverent questioning of modern theatre developments, including the work of his countryman Grotowski. Having disclosed the contemporaneity of Shakespeare and the Greek playwrights in his very influential books The Eating of the Gods and Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Kott turns to more recent authors and directors. Artists he has known personally—Peter Brook, Tadeusz Kantor, Eugene Ionesco, Witold Gombrowicz and Grotowski—are discussed along with other modern writers, and with digressions on Kabuki and Noh drama. A pair of brief but powerful meditations on Shakespeare in our time frames the whole.
The book is filled with parables and anecdotes as provocative as Grotowski’s “Flame on the Mountain”—only here, the critic tells the stories in his own words before questioning their validity. He moves from fable into critique, and from there, often into autobiography. Kott modestly suggests that contemporary life (his own) can match the absurdity and horror of any play or novel, as he recounts episodes from his Polish childhood, his travels, his war experiences with the resistance in Poland, and his encounters with Nazism and Stalinism. When touring Mao’s China, for example, Kott saw beggar children in the street and was told,
“Take a good look, Comrade, at these children. There are no such children in the whole of China.” He cites this moment as a modern, real-life recurrence of Nikolai Gogol’s ambiguous disclaimer about the town portrayed in The Inspector General: “Everyone knows there isn’t such a place in the whole of Russia.”
Kott’s personal knowledge of Russia’s postwar satellite Poland strongly influences his readings of plays and novels. He has seen Polish audiences interpret Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a parable about waiting for true Communism. (It never arrives.) As Martin Esslin notes in his introduction to the new collection, Kott’s critical perspective has been shaped by his survival of “the most intense and dangerous ordeals in the very center of the holocaust of our times.” Despite the horror, cultural repression and extermination he has witnessed, however, Kott remains surprisingly calm and witty throughout these essays. Civilization’s grace and refinement are preserved in the book even as he writes about civilization’s destruction.
Kott often sketches biographies of the artists under discussion, and considers their literature and performances extensions (not necessarily documents) of the times in which they lived. He presents these artists as his contemporaries—not difficult in the cases of Brook, Grotowski and Kantor, who have been his friends and colleagues for some time. But for Kott, the plays themselves also seem to absorb and reflect the lives of their audiences and the ideological phenomena that surround them: Stalin’s career forces Polish audiences to see its murderous outlines in a production of Macbeth, for example. Kott writes about this exchange between life and drama so artfully that it sometimes appears that history and literature have performed his critical tasks for him.
One of Kott’s essays in Shakespeare Our Contemporary is credited with having inspired Peter Brook’s famous R.S.C. production of King Lear. It seems that Brook read Kott’s essay “King Lear or Endgame,” and then as if it had been written by Beckett. These new essays—particularly those on Gogol, Ibsen and Witkiewicz—should inspire more such innovative stagings.
The Theatre of Essence offers an excellent introduction to both Kott and modern drama. In fact, after reading a few essays, one might begin to wonder if Gogol, Ibsen and others did not write their plays in collaboration with Jan Kott; he makes them his dramatists—and ours, as well.
Joel Schechter is the editor of Theater magazine and a professor at the Yale School of Drama.
