ARTS AND EXTERTAINMENT Nearly Executed Among Pines; Has New Shakespeare Theory

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30724, 13 April 1965, Page 7

ARTS AND EXTERTAINMENT Nearly Executed Among Pines; Has New Shakespeare Theory

(By PETER DUVAL SMITH, in the "Financial Times." Reprinted by arrangement.) “This was the situation, you ' see: that I was going to die. 1 ; was wearing a German uniform when the Russians cap- ! tured me, and so they werej going to shoot me as a spy. 1 could speak Russian well, but; at first that only made them; more suspicious. We were in; this pine forest, and they I began to shuffle about in the snow, arguing which tree to( stand me up against.

“It was very cold, and one of the Russians said, ‘We can’t shoot him without giving him a drink.’ so everybody had a mouthful from a bottle of vodka, and 1 was talking fast, trying to convince them I was a Pole and a Communist and on their side.

“It was very cold, as a matter of fact, so we all had another swallow of vodka, and then another, and then it was getting too dark, so they put off the shooting till morning. All night we were there in the forest, drinking and singing songs and with me talking my head off, and by the morning they believed me, and they didn’t shoot me.” NEW IDEAS

The speaker is Professor Jan Kott of the University of Warsaw, and the scene is Eastern Poland during the Russian advance of winter 1944. recalled in his study in Warsaw the other day when 1 visited him to talk about his book, “Shakespeare Our Contemporary.” which has taken theatrical Europe by the ears. The study and the theatre are very different worlds, and usually they don’t think much of each other, but a great director like Peter Brook

acknowledges that most of the j new ideas in his “King Lear"! came from Jan Kott, andl most of those ideas began in experiences like the one in the forest with the Russian soldiers. In the climate of Eastern Europe to-day, Jan Kott has arrived at a philosophy that cuts through some of the impenetrables in Shakespeare like a laser beam. What is this philosophy? In “Shakespeare Our Contemporary” it is seen most clearly in the famous essay on “King Lear” or “endgame.” The; mind of Shakespeare. Kott! says, is not so different from! the mind of Samuel Beckett. For both of them life is an absurdity. “Lear” is no more a tragedy than “endgame” is, or “Ham-

“let” for that matter or “Waiting for Godot.” Life is so awful, he says, that even tragedy isn’t adequate to say i how awful. When Lear is rav|ing on the heath, what is his ■suffering in aid of? Surely lhe's just being absurd, as absurd as Nell and Nagg iin “endgame,” lugubriously! dying in their dustbins? Or| as absurd as Kott himself, sav-i ed from a meaningless death | ■ by an act of muddled kindness and a few bottles of vodka.

THE ABSOLUTE ‘ “If they had shot me, that would not be a tragedy, just the absolute of the absurd.” Professor Kott poured me a jeup of Nescafe, a luxury in (Poland today. I “Why were you wearing a (German uniform?” I asked

him. “Well. I had a Polish Army one to start with, and that was very useful, because I was in the Resistance, and if they caught you with weapons in ordinary clothes, they sent you to somewhere like Auschwitz. My father went to Auschwitz and he didn’t come back. “They caught me during the Warsaw Rising and I was quite glad to leave for an

ordinary prison camp. We were waiting at the Glowny station beside our train with the flames of Warsaw in the sky, when someone called my Resistance name from the footplate of the engine. I went across, and my comrades pulled me inside the cab. and in a minute I was changed into the overalls of a German railway worker, and then they nushed me back on the platform with a swastika on mv arm. PICKING RUBBISH

“Well I didn’t have to go on l the train now, but what else could I do? The Germans were looking at me. and I hadn’t had a shave for days, so I realised I must pretend to be some very low kind of railway worker. I saw one of those sticks with a point on the end that are used for picking up old tickets and pieces of waste naper, so I got this and shuffled along among the Germans picking up these things. People were round me in every sort of misery and Warsaw was burning down, there were explosions every minute, and I thought: this is the (absolute of the absurd, me here with my stick and my rubbish, a situation suitable for Chariot. “Of course, one absurdity leads to another, and later I

was captured by the Russians, wearing this swastika suit my comrades gave me.” SEVERAL GODS Kott in his time has served many ideas. At 17 he was in prison under Pilsudski as a Communist demonstrator. In the middle thirties his hero was Malraux the man of many parts, “the teacher of life.” In 1938, as a young poet in Paris, he was paying court to Andre Breton and the surrealists. After that he had a go at the Thomism of Maritan, and the neopositivism of Carnap. All these were false gods, their teachings myths, as far as Kott was concerned. Their errors were the subject of his first book of criticism, “Mythology and Realism,” written in Lvov in the Ukraine during a German pogrom and later in Warsaw, where Kott scratched a living on the black market. Realism had taken over with a vengeance. After the war the MS. of

“Mythology and Realism” was found in the cellar of Kott's completely gutted house, only slightly singed. The book helped him to a place in the new Poland. He became a professor, editor of the best literary monthly, author of critical books about the English eighteenth and nineteenth century, translator of lonesco and Sartre, a prime mover in Polish literary politics. On and off he has been a member of the Party (today he says he is not) and he is certainly a Marxist, though of a peculiar sort. From this unusual vantage point, then, what has Jan Kott added to our understanding of Shakespeare? The insight, I think, of a man who can quote the scene from “Richard III” when Hastings is summoned to events that will end in his death —Hastings: “What is’t o’clock?” Messenger: “Upon the stroke of four”—and then remarks: “Who has not been awakened in this way at 4 a.m. at least once in his life?”