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’.