Jan Kott Book order

Tadeusz Kantor (1915-90) was renowned for his revolutionary theater performances in both his native Poland and abroad. Despite nominally being a Catholic, Kantor had a unique relationship with Jewish culture and incorporated many elements of Jewish theater into his works. In Kaddish, Jan Kott, an equally important figure in twentieth-century theater criticism, presents one of the most poignant descriptions of what might be called "the experience of Kantor." At the core of the book is a fundamental philosophical question: What can save the memory of Kantor's "Theatre of Death"--the Image, or the Word/Logos? Kott's biblical answer in Kaddish is that Kantor's theatre can be saved in its essence only by the Word, the Logos. This slim volume, Kott's final work, is a distilled meditation that casts light on how two of the most prominent figures in Western theater reflected on the philosophy of the stage.

This book is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare; more than that, however, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage-conceptions. Readers all over the world― Shakespeare Our Contemporary has been translated into nineteen languages since it appeared in 1961―have similarly found their responses to Shakespeare broadened and enriched. Mary McCarthy called the work "the best, the most alive, radical book about Shakespeare in at least a generation."