Grieving:

UNDER THE TITLE of ‘Old Friends’, Clive Barker mourned in the first issue of NTQ the passing of two men who, in very different ways, had devoted their lives to the service of the theatre – the American director Alan Schneider and the Scottish scholar who gave academic drama an international dimension, James Arnott. Both had been good friends and contributors to the old Theatre Quarterly.

And now, two more old friends to mourn, yet whose lives and achievements must also be celebrated. Jan Kott died, after a long illness, on 22 December, at the age of eighty-seven. He was the only one of our original advisory editors still on the masthead after one hundred and ten issues of the two journals. John McGrath died of leukaemia one month later, on 23 January, at the age of sixty-six.

JAN KOTT was a seminal critical mind of the twentieth century and one of the last of its theatre intellectuals. I mourn him as a friend and colleague. It is now almost half a century since this Polish expatriate first published Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a book that exploded our thinking about how Shakespeare could be produced on stage. It was Kott's habit to urge contemporary parallels on the classics, not through specious updating but through lived experience – in his case, a life under the Nazi occupation and later under Communism.

EVERY SO OFTEN, usually on a weekend, I would meet Jan Kott in Santa Monica for a coffee and a bagel. Having been weaned in the seedier cafés of Paris and Warsaw, this was a cosy reminder of the bohemian life he led before becoming an academic, a critic, a Resistance-fighter and an émigré.

Jan Kott invited me to conduct this formal ‘final interview’ early in 2001, after I shared with him a draft of the essay ‘Arden and Absolute Milan’ that follows. The essay and the interview were the culmination of over fifteen years of friendship and intermittent writing about Kott, which had extended to the translation of his works. I first met Jan and his wife Lidia at Berkeley in 1986, when they travelled from Los Angeles to see a production of Tadeusz Różewicz's White Marriage that I had directed and designed there, which proved the start of a long personal and professional relationship. I interviewed Kott at his modest apartment in Santa Monica, California, over the weekend of 31 March to 2 April 2001. Lidia had passed away the summer before, and his own health was extremely frail, requiring twenty-four-hour care by a group of charming and attentive Polish-speaking women. He shared his apartment after Lidia's death with an energetic black-and-white kitten, whose energy and mischief amused him greatly. Born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, he had a cereal box decal of Tony the Tiger stuck next to the name-plate on his apartment door (the name Kott also means ‘cat’ in Polish). He was not able to move about without a nurse and a walking frame, but he nevertheless insisted on inviting me out to dinner in a local Polish restaurant, where he heartily ate a meal of steak tartar and flaczki (Polish tripe soup), accompanied by a shot or two of vodka. His nurse, who was with us, seemed amused but not at all astonished by this performance. Afterwards, he admitted this was his first meal out of the house in months – it was possibly his last. In spite of his physical weakness, Kott's mind remained lucid, and he had clearly rehearsed the interview extensively before our meetings in person. Most of the questions I had prepared proved unnecessary. What is published here is culled from approximately five hours of taped material, which Kott later edited along with myself. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my Philadelphia colleague, Helena Morawska White, for her time and energy in transcribing the taped interviews in Polish, and to Michal Zadara for his careful work in translating the unedited text into English.

Annotated bibliography of Kott's contributions to the two journals.

In this essay, Allen J. Kuharski discusses Jan Kott as an exiled Polish writer best known for his essays on Shakespeare's plays, and compares and contrasts his writings with those of a variety of other Polish émigré writers, notably Witold Gombrowicz. He argues that Kott's most important contribution was ultimately as a performance theorist, in the traditions of Wyspiański and Brecht, rather than as a traditional critic or scholar, and in consequence he reached a wider readership in English and other languages than any other Polish writer. His choice of Shakespeare as a subject belied the full depth and complexity of the Polish sources (often experiential) for his readings of the plays – sources not always acknowledged in his work. Kuharski uses Kott's own syncretic, archetypal methods to interpret his life and work, explaining his position as an exiled writer via Shakespearean characters such as Duke Senior in As You Like It and Prospero in The Tempest – and, closest to the experience of the émigré, the cross-dressing Rosalind, compelled to belie herself in order to express herself. Tracing the evolution of Kott's complex existential self-definition in various phases of his life and writing, Kuharski concludes that the key to Kott's various authorial personae is the influence of the inter-war Polish writer and critic Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński. Allen J. Kuharski, Associate Editor for Theatre Journal, is the Director of the Theatre Studies Program at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, and has published extensively on Gombrowicz, Kott, and other aspects of contemporary Polish and American theatre in the US, UK, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. His translation and stage adaptation of Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke has been performed in various countries, winning a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001.

John McGrath died from leukaemia in January 2002, having put the final touches to his last book, Naked Thoughts That Roam About: Reflections on Theatre, 1958–2001, edited by Nadine Holdsworth (Nick Hern Books, 2002). The following article forms the conclusion to this collection of essays, lectures, interviews, theatre reviews, 7:84 company documents, programme notes, letters, and poems, for which McGrath provides a contextualizing commentary. Like the other pieces in the book, it testifies to McGrath's faith in theatre's ability to contribute to humanity through its engagement with people, communities, and political processes – a commitment he maintained and developed to the end of his life. In ‘Theatre and Democracy’ he drew on the work of the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis to frame his hopes for theatre in the twenty-first century – a theatre which would operate in public dialectical debate with the society from which it evolves, and, by asking hard questions about the social processes that construct that society, provide a voice for oppositional opinion and the marginalized. The essay was reworked from a keynote address to the ‘European Theatre, Justice, and Morality’ conference held at the University of London in June 1999, and in its earlier form appeared in the conference proceedings, published as Morality and Justice: the Challenge of European Theatre, edited by Edward Batley and David Bradby (Rodopi, 2001).

Who is producing site-specific performance in Britain? Who sees it? Where do these performances occur, or, more particularly, ‘take place’? What tools are used to construct a performance of place? Why is the site-specific mode chosen? And, crucially, how is it variously defined? Drawing on a survey of British practitioners conducted between November 2000 and December 2001, Fiona Wilkie sets out to explore these questions. While pointing to the wide variety of practices that might be delineated by the term ‘site-specific’, she analyzes the implications of such generalizations as can be made – about the types of performance site chosen, the effects of funding policy on the character of work being made, the possibilities for identifying a ‘site-specific’ audience, and the debates surrounding the terminology itself. Fiona Wilkie is currently completing a PhD at the University of Surrey, on which this article is based, which aims to develop a theoretical model for site-specific performance, with particular reference to the spectatorial role.

The avant-garde Japanese company Ban'yu Inryoku was formed following the death in 1983 of the inspirational writer and director Shuji Terayama, who has subsequently become a cult figure. This article explores his influence – both limiting and liberating – on the production by one of the founders of the company, his disciple J. A. Seazer, of an experimental musical version of King Lear, as Ria O. Douglas Kerr places the production – seen in England during the Japan Festival of 1991 – within the context of evolving attitudes towards the avant-garde theatrical movement in Japan during the late 'sixties, notably as modified by the national trauma of the gas attack in Tokyo of 1995. Adapting Shakespeare was a break with the Terayama tradition of presenting only works collectively created by the ensemble – and it also made their work more accessible to the intercultural festival circuit. Explicated by the printed synopsis which forms a ‘map’ of the play for its audiences, the production also used Brechtian signboards to signal the titles of scenes, while being predicated also on the ‘representation of the inner and the outer experience’ which was Artaud's perception of Balinese performance. Lear himself was in this sense the entranced dancer, depending on the guidance of his supporters. Douglas Kerr, who explores here the tensions between the cultural elements employed and between the ideological pulls for conservatism and for social change, is currently an advanced PhD student at Stanford University in American Literature. His interests include Performance Poetics and Buddhism in contemporary American poetry.

Keir Elam's observation in 1980 that ‘the theatrical text is defined and perceived above all in spatial terms’ reflected a growing attention to the significance of spatial organization and utilization in creative and perceptive processes in the theatre. In the last twenty years space has found its long-deserved status as a prominent feature of the theatrical experience and a key element in theatre studies. In this article Kinneret Noy focuses on a unique spatial component shared by two theatrical traditions – the Greek and the Japanese. By comparing and contrasting the function of the eisodos in the Greek theatre with that of the hashigakari in the Japanese Noh, she offers a fresh look at both forms. The spatial relation between the passageway and the main ‘stage’ create what Mitsuo Inoue terms a ‘movement space’. Noy borrows this term from Japanese architecture to point the connection between theatrical space and dramatic techniques. After discussing the main characteristics of a ‘movement space’ in the theatre she deals with the differences that exist between Noh and Greek theatres' spatial qualities, suggesting some connections between developments in the theatres and social and political changes. A graduate from the University of Pittsburgh (1997), Kinneret Noy studied with the Noh master Takabayshi Shinji in Kyoto, and currently teaches in the Theatre Department and East Asian Department of Haifa University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Carnival has been appropriated in many ways – by cultural critics after Bakhtin, who expanded the pre-Lenten festival to embrace all such inversions of the established order; by elegant maskers imposing their own social status on the celebration; and more recently by popular entertainers, creating the kind of mass event typified by the midsummer carnival at Notting Hill, divorced alike from religious and calendric associations. Here, Raimund Schäffner considers the critique dramatized in Mustapha Matura's Play Mas (1974) of the appropriation of carnival by the dominant political forces of the state in the context of the Trinidadian inheritance of social and racial tensions, colonial and post-colonial – the context also for the dismissal of the event as socially divisive rather than socially critical by such a figure as Derek Walcott. Raimund Schäffner teaches English and post-colonial literature in the English Department at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of a book on David Edgar and British political drama after 1968, and of articles on David Edgar, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, and Doug Lucie.