JAN KOTT: Jan Kott, who died on December 22nd aged 87, was more than a theatre critic and scholar: he was an involved philosopher of theatre. His questions and insights intervened in some of the foremost theatre productions of his time, most famously Peter Brook's 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company King Lear.
His appetite for theatre's connection with life was fed by a sensuous enjoyment and a moral independence which gives his essays the scope of Montaigne and the urgency of a whispered message. The pleasure he took was tempered by a bitter awareness of the harshness of history, the reversals of commitment and the penalties of politics. In this he was a true child of his time and place: a Jewish-born intellectual in mid-20th century Poland.
He was forged in the totalitarianisms of Hitler and of Stalin. Born in Warsaw of an intellectual family, he had a polyglot humanistic education and read law at Warsaw University.
But the background of the times was the oppressive pre-war Poland of brutal nationalistic colonels, anti-semitic discrimination, and extreme-right thugs in the universities. Small wonder that he had begun to see the world as a place of "round-ups and summary executions". In 1938, a scholarship took him to Paris for a year.
In September 1939, Jan Kott fought in the Polish army in its doomed campaign against the Nazi invasion and then, after a period in Lvov, returned to Nazi-occupied Warsaw. The terror of the occupation was the subject of his 1994 memoir, Still Alive? In a dizzying world of violence, heroism and betrayal, he joined both the communist-led underground and the nationalist partisans, leading a life on the run, witnessing experimental plays and poetry in cellars, skirting death, finding brief love in a time of destruction. From such fierce experiences of public conflict crashing into and often crushing personal life, he fashioned his concept of the implacable great mechanism of history.
After the war, seeking firm ground, he joined the Communist Party, and became one of Poland's "cultural tsars", dealing out harsh Marxist polemic. He was a co-founder of the Institute of Literary Research and had three professorships.
But by 1956, after de-Stalinisation began at the Soviet Communist Party's 20th congress, he left behind even this orthodoxy, quitting the party in 1957, but still being allowed to write and publish in that controlled but contradictory society.
This is why his portrayal of Hamlet in his most influential book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, struck theatre-makers in Western Europe and the US with such force. In his gaze, familiar phrases - "Denmark's a prison", "the gallows are built stronger than the church" - became immediate references to a world of totalitarian power. "Here, everyone is being watched," he wrote of Elsinore. "This watchfulness corrodes everything: marriage, love, friendship." This was both piercing theatre criticism and the coded language of dissent.
The other pole of his vision was the void left by undermined values, acutely felt by a man who lived in the shadow of Auschwitz. He charted this moral wilderness along with his contemporaries in Europe - the Polish theatre-maker Tadeusz Kantor, Malraux, Sartre, Beckett. "Beckettian" was the adjective reached for when Brook, having read Jan Kott's essay on King Lear And Endgame, sliced the steel blades of a thunder-machine into Lear's grey heath, and made his blinded Gloucester reminiscent of Beckett's Hamm.
In 1963, he researched at St Antony's College, Oxford, and first visited the US in 1966 with a stint at Yale and later at Berkeley. He was granted political asylum in 1969.
He welcomed the sensuality of the American counter-culture, with reservations about its utopian naïvety, its search for "an impossible theatre" of the streets as well as the stage.
At Robert Brustein's cosmopolitan Yale School of Drama, he continued to influence a rising wave of actors and directors. For his last 30 years in American universities he danced on the borders of the academia and theatre, testing structuralism and critical theory against the teasing truths of performance.
In his later books there is a more piercing speculative note, with metaphysical questions quarried out of theatrical action. His 1968 Theatre Notebook evokes haunting theatre experiences, from Japanese Noh purity to a Neapolitan Harlequin whose mercurial switches he especially relished.
The Eating Of The Gods (1973) is a tough-minded exploration of the clash of the profane and the sacred in Greek tragedy, its readings of the classic plays informed not only by Levi-Strauss but also by his vision of fate and the gods as an unrelenting central committee of Mount Olympus. In The Theatre Of Essence (1984), he drew together essays on Grotowski and other Polish playwrights.
In the recriminations of émigre politics, Jan Kott had his critics. But with his irony, his awareness of transience, and his passionate pursuit of questioning through theatre, Jan Kott was a Harlequin of ambiguous times.
His was predeceased by his wife Lidia in 2000. He is survived by his son Michael and daughter Theresa.
Jan Kott: born 1914; died, December 2001