Kaddish

Tadeusz Kantor (1915-90) was known for his revolutionary theatre in Poland and abroad. Although he was nominally Catholic, he had a distinctive relationship with Jewish culture and wove many elements of Jewish theatre into his work, including his play The Dead Class.

In Kaddish, Jan Kott, an equally significant figure in twentieth-century theatre criticism, gives one of the most moving accounts of what might be called the experience of Kantor. The book turns on a basic philosophical question: what can preserve the memory of Kantor's Theatre of Death, the Image or the Word (the Logos)? Kott's answer is a biblical one. He holds that the essence of Kantor's theatre can be saved only by the Word.

This slim volume was Kott's final work. It is a distilled meditation on how two of the most prominent figures in Western theatre thought about the philosophy of the stage.