Volume 32, Number 4 · March 14, 1985
Living Theater
By Robert Brustein
The Theater of Essence
by Jan Kott
Northwestern University Press, 218 pp., $9.95 (paper)
In his introduction to Jan Kott's new collection of essays, The Theater of Essence, Martin Esslin calls him a vestige of a vanishing intellectual class: the guardian of culture and homme de lettres. It is a surprising way to characterize a maverick who turned Shakespeare into an anti-Stalinist and read Greek tragedy through the bifocals of Bertolt Brecht. But I think Esslin is essentially correct. A literary humanist infatuated with live theater, a classicist absorbed with advanced dramatic forms, an ex-Marxist still dreaming revolutionary fantasies, Kott is something of an anomaly among contemporary scholars—aloof yet engaged, ironic and passionate, maintaining a neutral position in the battle of the ancients and the moderns. Kott can employ arcane structuralist and semantic methods to unearth the radical implications of a text while affirming that a play has no real life until it is staged.
Review, 2513 words
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