IN THE BACKS of my mother's wartime diaries are long lists of the dates of letters written to and received from my reluctant soldier father, all neatly numbered to accord with some arcane requirement of the military mail. The letters have not survived: but the diaries, though little more than appointments books, were gathered into decennial sets and secured by long-perished rubber- bands. Trying to reconstruct a little of my early childhood from the names and places of those barebones jottings, I have often wondered why the diaries were felt to be so sacrosanct, while letters which exchanged emotions, shared feelings about war, Went uncherished and unkept. Of course, when the war came to an end, so did the letters.

COLLEAGUES far more erudite than I can define those qualities of intelligence and percipience that make Jan Kott such a formidable scholar. I want to concentrate exclusively on the personality of the man, as it is that to which I was first drawn when I met him in Edinburgh in 1962.

IT IS A STRANGE and little-known fact that even scholars and critics can be characterized in terms of changing light bulbs. A classicist can change a light bulb, but the old one was essentially better. The modernist may change a light bulb, but only after the house has been completely rewired. In their respective contexts, most structuralists are able to change a light bulb, provided, since these processes are always two-way, that the light bulb doesn't change them first. But when Jan Kott changes a light bulb, he has the unfortunate knack of switching on the whole Christmas tree.

In 1993–94 Eric Bentley prepared an entertainment entitled Tingle Tangle: a Wedekind Cabaret, with music by William Bolcom, Peter Winkler, and Arnold Black. This contained many Wedekind lyrics in [approximations] by Bentley, and also the four original lyrics by Bentley which are printed below, as a tribute to Jan Kott – and a [thank you] for the essay on Wedekind which Kott contributed to The Play and Its Critic, the Festschrift assembled for Bentley's seventieth birthday in 1976. One of the lyrics below, [Lulu], was included in The First Lulu in 1993: the others are published here for the first time. All four lyrics are copyright 1993, 1994, by Eric Bentley.

I KNOW THE TITLE: Something Rich and Strange. But I do not know if I will ever make the performance about the return of the ancient gods.

FROM THE TIME of Sophocles' Antigone, his version of the myth – which relates how Oedipus' daughter buried her brother Polyneices against the decree of Creon and, upon being sentenced to death, died by her own hand – became invariable. It was in modern treatments of the story that changes began to be introduced: these concerned the person or authorities representing the law; the time when the events occur, and their location; the person whom Antigone buries; and why she dies. But a continuing, necessary determinant in such modern incarnations of the myth has been the conflict between the ethos of authority and the ethos of moral belief – this latter being motivated by religion, duty to the family, or love. Without such an opposition, Antigone loses its ground as tragedy.

I could not have written this essay without the help of friends and counsellors in Calcutta, Bhubaneswar, and Puri. They listened carefully to my questions and took time to help me appreciate what I was encountering for the first time on stage and in life around me. This indebtedness makes this essay a fitting contribution to an issue in honour of Jan Kott, for he has offered encouragement of the same kind on many occasions. First I had read his Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and then I was able to enjoy his company, at Brighton, Vancouver, and for over two years at Stony Brook, Long Island. He helped me to think adventurously and showed me how to be watchful. I owe him a great debt and this essay is offered in token of my gratitude, pleasure, and admiration.

This essay is offered as a tribute to Jan Kott in appreciation of all he has done to stimulate international enthusiasm for Shakespeare's plays.

How well Jan Kott understands that theatre is always our contemporary and must be shown to be our contemporary if it is not to become like old bones locked up in a glass case in a museum. He also explains with rare finesse that it is contemporary differently. Theatre lives in the here-and-now according to the culture making, interpreting, and appropriating it – and even reappropriating it, when it seems to have gone to belong somewhere else. Jan Kott knows, too, that reclaiming a culture means reclaiming a part of oneself. This tribute – part of research supported by the Australian Research Council Large Grants Scheme – explores a kind of reappropriation in the work of an early, professed admirer of Kott, Peter Brook.

HOW DID YOU WORK with Peter Brook on Impressions de Pelléas? Did he group the three different casts together so that you could sing and act your part together – three Mélisandes, three Golauds, and so on? Was the aim to find one single interpretation or three different ones?

My introduction to Jan Kott was through his Theatre Notebook 1947–1967, which for me still captures the paradoxes of the man and his work. For all his cosmopolitanism, his work on Shakespeare, and his many years of life in exile, Kott remains very much an embodiment of the vitality of the post-war Polish theatre he helped to establish and later promoted abroad – this in spite of his disclaimer of being any kind of ‘expert’ on the contemporary Polish stage. Kott has always shown the best qualities of a theatre artist: lack of pretension, seemingly boundless energy, an immediacy of engagement with both theatrical performance and other people. Perhaps even more in person than in his writing, he possesses what Joseph Chaikin has called ‘presence’. As when I first met Kott in the mid 1980s, while Poland was still under martial law and he was unable to obtain a travel visa on account of public statements he had made regarding the Jaruzelski regime, he has remained a key connection to certain values both in the theatre and in Poland itself, and these he has best represented when they have been most needed.

Jan Kott belongs to that outstanding group of Polish writers and intellectuals who stand as living proof of the immense talent and genius of their generation which triumphantly emerged from the Nazis' attempts to annihilate the Polish nation, not only physically but culturally as well. He is the embodiment of all the best qualities of the great tradition of Central European men of letters: intellectuals of universal erudition, critical insight, deep humanity, combined with a divine sense of humour – a worthy peer of giants like Kantor, Milosz, and Mrozek.

JAN KOTT has been a young man for as long as I have known him, which is going on twenty eight years, so the idea of celebrating his eightieth birthday boggles the mind. Jan Kott's clear mind has never been boggled in the slightest. It has functioned rather as a continuing source of youthful energy, original ideas, and dazzling insights. Therefore, one way to salute this innovative thinker is by trying to produce thoughts about the theatre inspired by his ground-breaking work, with the understanding that none of our perceptions will ever match those of the ‘onlie begetter.’ My own poor contribution is ‘The Theatre of Guilt’, which I hope he will recognize as an effort to help produce a cultural atmosphere where a theatre worthy of his imagination can still flourish. I offer it with respect and love for a man who, even when he reaches a hundred, will still, like Shakespeare, be ‘our contemporary’.