‘One of the deepest books on the theatre experience. The Kantor theatre, thanks to Jan Kott, comes back to us in its essence.’—Richard Schechner
‘Kott is a truly outstanding drama critic of a type which goes back to Dr. Johnson, Lessing, Coleridge, Hazlitt, or Edmund Wilson. . . . He has the gift of seeing connections between literature, philosophy, anthropology, political theory, and psychology which are only open to so widely read and so cultured a mind as his.’—Martin Esslin, author of The Theatre of the Absurd
‘Kott is the best guide I know to the theatrical innovators of our time. Even the erudite scholarship is illuminated in the end by his own historical destiny as an exiled intellectual; if he looks backward to read Ibsen anew, or examines the perverse heart of Kabuki, his discoveries are still filtered through the consciousness and experience of Kott our contemporary.’—Philip Roth