On stage, we see, simultaneously, very real and precisely defined objects together with action which tries to communicate ideas or emotions to the audience. When looking at a performance the spectator not only sees a real object or a real character, but experiences their connection with internal images and associations. In this way we can say that while Kantor's theatre is itself a reality, we can also say that what the spectator sees is his or her own reality.

By this I don't mean that emotion is simply the effect of what we are seeing. It is the effect of the discovery of this inner, personal space which can only speak through the language of emotions, a language which requires great care to understand what it is really speaking of. It is very easy to invert the manifest or surface subject of this space with an inner, hidden message related to the functioning of this space itself. In a sense it is akin to the dream. We know that a dream is important not for its content, but for what it is speaking to us of, and in this way the same dream can have different meanings for different dreamers. The same thing happens, I think, in theatre. Each spectator will see a different performance, if each of them has the strength and courage to pass through their self-defences; if they have the interest to understand that the real meaning does not consist of what is happening on stage, but in their own ability to create an homology between these outer and inner spaces, to establish a dialogue between them. This dialogue is not easy to realise because the bridge between these two spaces is so fragile and we don't really have the instruments to define such a terra incognita, which can only be spoken of negatively.

In my opinion, the critic's function, especially when dealing with a living performance, is to indicate that this access is possible, however temporary and local it may be. Probably the most important part of the critic's work has already begun before we start with any professional or technical appraisals. In this sense, I fully agree with Kantor when he spoke of the spectator as a football supporter who doesn't play on the field but who experiences every movement as though performing it. The supporter doesn't just sit and watch what is happening. Besides their excitment at the game, they know that they are also performing. The very experience of following the game is itself a performance, accompanied by feeling the movement of some unknown part of oneself.

If I had to periodise Kantor's career, I would say that Wielopole, Wielopole marks a watershed for his theatre, because this was the first time that Kantor was not only the director and the stage designer, but also the author of the play. Up until 1980, Kantor had worked first as a stage designer, and then as both stage designer and director, using Witkiewicz's plays. These were dismantled and reassembled in a radical transformation of the original. In Kantor's view, theatre is not the illustration of a text, but the chance meeting of texts, objects, actors, bodies, drawings and the memory of paintings and cultural stereotypes, all accorded the same ontological value.

The Dead Class, which was Kantor's first international success with his Cricot 2 company, was based on Witkiewicz's Tumour Brainowicz. Although unrecognisable in the production, the play was nonetheless a starting point. As Kantor himself said: ''Witkiewicz was not the author, but the partner, of the performance. We don't play Witkiewicz, but with him.'' With Wielopole, Wielopole, however, Kantor for the first time renounced the support of a pre-existing text. From this time on, theatre for Kantor begins to speak a visual language.

We can also see in this new period the results of his experience with the Happenings he had been creating since the fifties. Kantor called his Happenings 'Cricotages' and differentiated them from Happenings by an absolute organisation of all the elements and a refusal of improvisation and chance. In his Cricotages he experimented with the deformation of elements, in order to allow him to steal from reality and its objects. This notion of theft pervades his representation of the function of the artist, who must ''move like a thief through reality'', resituating the object to show its hidden face, and destroying the idea of reality as a given order of things.

When, for instance, he realised the Cricotage The Anatomy Lesson

Rembrandt's well-known painting was used as the starting point for a composition in which, even if the scheme of the original was respected (in terms of the placing of the figures), the real object of the lesson was not the human body but its emballage, or wrapping, through which Kantor explored on stage all its secrets: linings, button holes, hooks, pockets and their hidden contents, tickets, papers, addresses, matches, coins, etc.

Both written and spoken texts are treated in the same way. Logical articulations which structure the discourse's hierarchies are laid out and dissected. Minced into fragmentary and stereotypical phrases, words seem to hang in space. From Wielopole, Wielopole on, Kantor is the author of the texts he directs, but these texts are produced by scenic actions, by their internal arrangement. The text becomes an object, made out of clichéd phrases: snatches of banal conversation, Biblical verses, bits of mumbled prayer, ritual formulas, lists of actions and objects, adverts taken from old newspapers, fragments of old and unimportant letters, popular songs and anodine questions which expect no answer, and for that reason perhaps are full of fear.

Derived largely from the actors' improvisations during rehearsals, the texts of Wielopole, Wielopole and Let the artists die! were initially nothing but an amalgam of material that had been transcribed or recorded by the actors themselves. Then, little by little, as the actions arranged themselves, Kantor intervened. He chose the phrases which seemed to him to be the happiest or funniest, but then he treated these phrases as if he were dealing with music. Their tones and curves of intensity imposed phonetic dislocations. Each word was integrated into the rhythym of the action which alone offered a meaning. Autonomous in their relationship with the objects they identify, the words - as sounds - were freed from their given significations.

The actors of Cricot grind words like mills. They create a sort of verbal dough, anterior to all meaning. Perhaps this is why the astonished spectators believe that they have been touched by the Pentacostal fire – for they have the impression of understanding what they hear. Sometimes we do indeed understand things which nevertheless are not clearly delivered - and these are often the most important.

Kantor's actors integrate themselves with the plastic, pictorial and tonal elements of the action. In the Cricotage Where are the Snows of Yesteryear? the starting point was a special kind of indestructible paper which Kantor received as a gift from one of his Swedish collectors. This very odd material was used both for clothing and to mimic the colour of snow, and thus to evoke Villon's Ballad of Yesteryear. Kantor linked the idea of snow and of time passing to the idea of history and its alternating movements, as well as to the idea of the alternation between sin and forgiveness. One of the Psalms says that if the Lord touches a man with a hyssop branch the man will become white as the snow.

These three elements - the indestructible paper, the continuity of history, even through upheaval, and redemption - were all Kantor needed to recreate the War. The burning of the Warsaw ghetto was evoked with a song and by two Rabbis trying to put out the fire with small buckets. As the exercise of diplomacy to avoid war seems to be purely formal, so Kantor made the Janicki twins - long-standing actors in the company - dance a perfect ballroom tango, wrapped in the same red clothing as a couple of cardinals. The Last Judgement was evoked by a machine with an enormous tuba going pointlessly up and down. The actors played a tug-of-war but no one won, and a long piece of indestructible paper was laid over their corpses to show that radical change is impossible as history repeats itself, as does the hope of redemption.

In his 1963 manifesto The Autonomous Theatre, Kantor stressed the idea that the theatre is not ''a reproductive mechanism, i.e. a mechanism whose aim is to present an interpretation of a piece of literature on stage, but a mechanism that has its own independent existence... I do not apply the concept of the autonomous theatre to explain the dramatic text, to translate it into the language of theatre, to interpret it, or to find its new meanings... Reaching zero, destruction, the nullification of phenomena, elements or events, relieves them of the burden of leading a practical life and allows them to turn into stage material that is moulded independently.''

All Kantor's theatrical theory is based upon the discovery of an unknown aspect of reality, a reality shown in its elementary state, without any predicate or judgement of value. The idea of a 'reality of the lowest rank' is deeply connected with the aim of erasing the boundaries between animate and inanimate, to show how the same suffering cuts across all levels of existence. As Kantor says, it is beside the rubbish bin that the object reveals that it too belongs to the life-stream which carries human beings towards the same loss of meaning. The experience of war, of the concentration camps, and the loss of trust in human reason, erases the hierarchies between man and objects, and destroys the privileged status accorded to the idea of humanity.

By changing perspectives within the staging of our experience, Kantor wants to show that what we call reality is a pretence: that on the one hand all universal values are lies, and on the other, that what we are used to regarding as degraded reality contains the deepest and truest image of our human condition. His performances try to play with these two levels, producing contradictions and oppositions to dislocate the framework of moral evaluation. In the same way, performance for Kantor is not representation, but rather the presentation of this fight between these two levels. Only very special actors can admit this dangerous situation on stage, where they are supposed to be themselves, but at the same time have to be the screen of deeper and unknown levels of memory and body, a stranger to themselves.

The Cricot 2 actors were special because they were not actors at all. They were artists, painters, writers, or ordinary people who Kantor met and chose because of their often unremarkable presence. The Janicki twins, for instance, are jewellers, specialists in valuing diamonds. Being identical twins, Kantor often used them to underscore the multiplication of personality and the uncanny. He would observe and even sketch them in their daily lives, putting part of their personalities into his characters. Showing a profound and acute understanding of them, he had them play both men and women, giving them a violent, authoritarian, marginalised or exhibitionist character.

In the manfesto that Kantor wrote about the dead as a model for actors, he stressed the idea that actors are a pure potentiality who have to be absent to themselves, to show the distance and strangeness that we feel with a corpse. In this way Kantor can be seen as a gentle vampire using the life, the shape, the sounds, the voices, the intimate life of his actors as material to nourish his creation. He knew perfectly well that he depended on his actors. He was obliged, for instance, to change one character because the actor who he thought could play it was ill; but then at other times he was quite capable of substituting them with what seemed to be a cynical indifference. For Kantor, Cricot 2 was his family and, as in a family, there were relationships based on love and mutual understanding, but also on power, money and intolerance.

What is an actor for Kantor? With what kind of physical and psychological constraints is he or she confronted? The actor evokes a moment in the cycle of transformations which work on all matter. Humbled and frustrated in their pretension to be at the centre of the action, the actors must struggle to make themselves heard. They must play in the corners, with even their most complex actions being continually interrupted. Actors slip into the skins of characters in a totally fraudulent way. They are usurpers. But do they know who they are, where they come from and where they are going?

Survivors of forgotten catastrophes, without ties, heading towards an uncertain end, Kantor's actors graft their bodies onto ordinary objects: a chair, a cart, a machine, a plank of wood, an arch, a table. Having become 'bio-objects', they express the different levels of life assumed by reality. In this symbiosis, which is the living part and which is the prosthesis? This theatrical construction assaults the actors' physical being, after having destroyed the psychological reference for their action. Deprived of all links with everyday life and the order of psychological reference, the actor takes leave of known and familiar ground, in order to offer a pure receptiveness. Uncertain of his or her status, hardly sure of their own existence, the actor becomes the image of a naked humanity. The actor's body becomes a space traversed by gestures, snatches of text, disparate memories. Divided, bodies with a double life, these actors are mannequins. They take on situations destined for someone else.

It might seem contradictory that, while proposing a theory of the actor as mannequin, of the actor demonstrating the stiffness of a corpse, with an abstract psychology, Kantor was at the same time fascinated by the bodies and the faces of the Cricot actors - to the point that silhouettes of some of them constituted the language of his plastic imagination. Many photos have captured the look of connivance between Kantor - who remained on stage constantly, in order to destroy theatrical illusion - and his actors. Sometimes they show an amused or marvelling look, at other times an irritated or frankly disapproving look. One could say that the actors' gesture performs according to this look, which gives it the intensity of a ritual. This fascination, however, does not exclude either a certain distance or cruelty. Kantor's look isn't only that of an orchestra conductor who watches over the performers of his music. It's the look of someone who observes individuals, actors in this case, going towards a foreseeable and fatal destination. Evening after evening, Kantor watched how they would cope with this difficult experience.

While treating of the ambivalences and inconsistencies of the heart, the relationships between Kantor and the Cricot actors developed, above all, with a tremendous mutual trust. This was the same trust as that which unites acrobats when they have to work together in a dangerous move without a net. Each one knows that their life is in the others' hands. Kantor stayed on stage the whole time and, besides the reason he himself gave to explain this strange directorial role, his function was to help the actors know where they were, to ensure that they sustain on stage a level of personal reality. For this reason too the public is very important, not only to make the performance possible, but also to create the emotional atmosphere within which the real performance is ultimately produced.

Kantor offers an example of the idea of a theatre of real life, as this had been proposed by Artaud and Genet. While Kantor would never accept the idea of any influence on his own work, the theatre of death (as Kantor defined his theatre) sounds like Genet's notion of theatre as an activity which must be enacted or lived in a cemetry, as a ritual played for the people of shadows, for the dead who authenticate life. But in Kantor's view of theatre the idea of a ritual is toned down by an ironic and iconoclastic attitude, which does not even spare the respect owed to the dead or the rituals connected with death. Like Genet, Kantor bases the construction of his performance on symmetrical and repetitive situations which are not the sign of a play of mirrors, but a concrete representation of the similarities between previously unconnected objects. For instance, Kantor often uses references to well-known paintings as a model for the disposition of the actors (Velasquez's La Meninas in Today is my Birthday, for example; The Last Supper by Leonardo for Wielopole, Wielopole; or Veit Stoss's Nuremberg Triptych in Let the Artists Die!). In this way, Kantor projects onto an often brutal and degraded reality the inextinguishable light of the memory of, and nostalgia for, another life.

Even if Kantor deals with a 'reality of the lowest rank', he does not aim to give an homogeneous image of reality; rather, he tries to stress the contradictory levels of reality. Touching situations change into comic or parodic ones; popular music changes into classical, high-culture music; even noises become music, as in Where are the Snows of Yesteryear? where the noise of the actors trying to rip paper becomes a sound in which the trumpet of the Last Judgement machine can be heard. Kantor says that his theatre is a theatre of reality, and that the objects we find on the stage are not props or accessories, but respond to a practical function. Of course, all this serves a polemic against theatre as illusion. The object in Kantor's theatre is very carefully constructed, respecting the character of the material of which it is made. We can hardly say that they are objets trouvés though, as Kantor claims.

We probably cannot understand Kantor's position with respect to materials and objects if we do not bear in mind his experience as a visual artist deeply influenced by Constructivism, Dadaism and Surrealism. Kantor brings his theatre experience to his painting, and his use of space shows a constant tendency to escape from the defined and flat space of the canvas. On the other hand, as a theatre artist, he uses theatrical space not like an empty box where the principal elements are the characters, but as a frame in which all the elements work together to construct a space which is an inner space, a space of the emotions.

Recall what Braques replied when asked what a painting was: "You say here there is a dish, here there is an apple, but where the painting really is is the space between the dish and the apple." In this sense, Kantor organises movements and compositions in theatrical space not only to direct our attention to what is happening, but to suggest something that exists between all these elements. He frequently organises a scene with a double movement - from an empty space to a crowded one, and from a very concentrated moment to a diffused one.

For this reason I have the impression that for Kantor theatrical space is something elastic, not given and inflexible, but something which beats like a heart, calling the characters into situations from behind the 'door', from the 'beyond', which means from a spiritual dimension, from the dimension of memory. These characters arrive in the 'room', on the stage, without knowing exactly why they have been called, but they are obliged to follow a kind of blind compulsion which manifests itself in the form of a figurative composition, giving them a meaning. In Wielopole, Wielopole the mother is seized from behind the door, where she was lying as a lifeless puppet, and she enters the room in a death-and-marriage dance arranged in order to show how this marriage is one instance of a constantly recurring crucifixion.

As Kantor acknowledges, Bruno Schulz's Cinnamon Shops inspired the use of puppets, and of actors used as puppets, in his theatre. In one of his novels, Schulz described puppets not as inanimate objects, but as objects suffering without the possibility of complaining, of communicating their suffering. Their stiffness and immobile expressions provoke people to treat them carelessly, as if they feel nothing, but for Schulz their suffering exists even if there are no words to express it. For Kantor, human beings are in the same situation, being unable to understand the life they are living or the suffering they experience.

Kantor's use of puppets as corpses is provocative, as he wants to oblige the audience to see what they would rather avoid. In this sense we can say that Kantor's theories are not so far removed from Artaud's ideas on Cruelty when he says that theatre has to reestablish the link with our inner anguish. For Artaud, mankind is torn between good and evil, but is itself evil. For Kantor, each of these two terms exists because of the other one, and our weakness is to dream about good whilst enacting evil.

The main preoccupation of Kantor's theatre is the War. As a Pole, we can understand that the experience of the War was deeply internalised, but Kantor's memory is turned not only towards the past. He establishes direct equivalences with contemporary situations. Those who were the victims in the past become perpetrators of the same crimes that they suffered from. There is no place for hope here and Kantor's proposal is to look at reality rather than believe in ideologies.

Can we say that the reality we experience is more real than the reality of our imagination though? Kantor's answer, of course, is that reality is a combination of these two levels, but in The Real 'I' manifesto (of 1988), he criticised his own, previous theorising: "The word 'reproducing' had a false ring - something in it would contradict autonomy, the autonomy of the theatre. I was proud of my radical thoughts. I was not, however, orthodox enough to believe in them to the end... How was it really with that reality? Did I really do for it all that I could have done? I begin to be a harsh judge of myself."

After Wielopole, Wielopole, where he used his family story, Kantor used his own personal experience as the subject of the plays. In I Shall Never Return and Today is my Birthday, he presents himself on stage as a kind of 'illegal' director, as both a character and as a puppet. In the The Real 'I' manifesto, he wrote: "My presence on stage was supposed to cover up the failure of my idea of the 'impossible', of 'non-acting', and to rescue at least its last proof and argument: 'pretending'. But deep in my soul I did not give up. Life itself gave me a hand... I understand this last journey in my life as well as in my art as a never ending journey, beyond time and beyond all rules... I am... on stage. I will not be a performer. Instead, poor fragments of my own life will become 'ready-made objects'."

Kantor is always present on stage, and his presence provoked many questions, to which he responded by saying that he wanted to occupy an illegal place on stage. He said that he was not playing the character of the director, but was there as a real person, to add a touch of reality against which the actors had to fight. His role was unheimlich, uncanny, reversing the poles of ordinary and extraordinary. Sometimes he said that he was on stage to help the actors, to stop them when they became boring or were unable to remember what they had to do; but often his role was to balance out the elements of the stage composition.

During an interview with me, he said that: "Recently, I thought about the question and about everything which has been said about my presence on stage. The reason for my presence isn't just to play the role of the destroyer of illusion. I realised I am a bit of an actor, and that this is necessary to make the play, to make the show full. What do I do? I'm the one who brings the actors in, who chose the actors. From time to time, I'm satisfied; and from time to time I'm not happy, indeed sometimes I'm even furious. So the spectator has the impression that I'm playing the role of the author. In Futurist plays, the author, dissatisfied with the action, started to make himself heard. In Blok's The Fairground Booth, the author interrupts the action because he doesn't recognise his play any more. There's my role. I'm a bit actor, especially in the last show Let the Artists Die! I let in a whole gang of people who, as soon as they're on stage, behave as if they're not taking any notice of my desires. I'm put in the actors' hands. There's my role: I'm a bit actor. There's the new interpretation of my presence on stage..."

In spite of his pretension of offering theoretical thinking about theatre, it is possible to read these writings as an extension of the framework of 'theatre' itself, as poetic confessions which are symbiotically interwoven with the notion of 'performance'. "I do not have a programme. There are some words which I love, there are some situations which I love." Among the words and phrases that he said he loved, he cited: "illegal, derisory, ironic, sardonic, being against everything, against society, being alone with respect to the world, humour, intelligence, blasphemy, sacrilege (ah! I like that one a lot), lyricism, strength, demonstrate, demonstrate with placards, risk, danger." But amongst the dangers, the most important were the private or intimate dangers.

Reading these writings now, from the different perspective offered by his death, we are struck by this intimate and personal dimension which is sometimes hidden by Kantor's will to impose a theoretical framework on his theatre. Kantor sought a kind of continuity and philsophical structure in his work. It is not by chance, for instance, that in his artistic language the word 'road' occurs frequently, even though Kantor knew very well that this road has no end. Indeed, 'Farther on, Nothing', was the title he gave to an exhibition of his paintings in 1989. Now, after his death, we are obliged to rethink his theatre and to reread his texts in a different way, without being influenced by his self-representation. By this change of perspective, we start elaborating the mourning of his death which was inscribed in the images he had shown on the stage.

In fact, for Kantor, absence or death, and the nostalgia which is provoked by this absence, defy any possible representation. Kantor strongly underlines the fact that on stage he uses real objects, and for this very reason, that there is no representation but only reality. It is, however, difficult to follow him completely in this direction because spectators deal with their own emotions provoked by what reality means to them. The stress that Kantor put on objects, on degraded and 'low rank' reality, is not only a provocative choice to fight against consumerism and the proclamation of the death of art in affluent Western societies; it is also a way of speaking about a very general condition without overspecifying it.

In many of Kantor's plays, we can see how objects play different functions, and how the same character can appear in different contexts. In Kantor's view, the object is a Dadaist ready-made, and the different functions it has do not fundamentally change its ontological status. But for the spectator, it is impossible not to make links between, for instance, the camera and the machine-gun used by the photographer in Wielopole, Wielopole. In the same play, Kantor uses a Catholic cross as an accessory for the Priest character; but this cross becomes the sign of Polish history, especially at the time when Wielopole, Wielopole was produced (in 1980) when Solidarity was gaining popularity.

Kantor uses perfectly this predisposition of the spectator and, as he said, he constructs the emotions of the audience. By this, he means that he does not want to be either a priest or a preacher. He wants the audience to create a distance from their own emotions, which are not strong enough themselves to change the historical situation. If Kantor lays the stress on emotions, he also stresses construction. In all of his plays, we find a very strong and well-ordered construction of each scene, in which each line and volume is organised to 'paint' an emotionally meaningful space.

As the Argentinian psycho-analyst Ignacio Matte Blanco has said, space can be simultaneously the real space of the stage and the space of our personal emotions, which take this form to speak to us. But for Kantor, volumes and space are not static. In this way he is not simply a painter lending himself to the theatre. He organises the contrasts and the tensions between characters or ideas in order to show the energy and the violence of their struggle. Even when the stage is empty, or when you can only see puppets, as for instance in certain moments of The Dead Class, the timing of the scene totally changes its meaning. In The Dead Class there is a little old man sitting between puppets, as if he were a puppet himself, and it is sometimes very difficult to know who is the puppet and who is the actor. The little old man is looking at you with wide open eyes, and even if you think he is only a puppet, his look is unbearable because it lasts too long.

In Wielopole, Wielopole music plays a big role. The character of Uncle Stasio, who is the character of the deportee returning from one of the many wars that Poland lost against the Russian Empire, is deeply connected with the most typical of Polish music - a Christmas carol which Chopin adapted from popular melodies. This character is constituted by his costume, his ripped clothes and a violin which is a part of his body. He shows the continuity between different levels of reality and its material, and he is surrounded by the Chopin music which brings a message of love and quiet happiness. But he is equally an artificial character and the music he plays is produced mechanically. When the Priest enters the stage with the corpse of the young man of the family who died during the War, bringing him on attached to a cross which rolls on ironic and blasphemous wheels, the deportee starts playing his sweet song. We have fake music for a theatrical tragedy which does not allow the spectator to avoid these simultaneously different levels.

When this emotionally charged atmosphere is in place, the music is suddenly interrupted by a mechanically repeated note, revealing the artifice and showing how these sentiments exist only by mistake or through misunderstanding. Once again, we find the deportee playing his song at the end of Wielopole, Wielopole when, after the war and its destruction, the family, the soldiers, the Catholic Priest, the Rabbi, the photographer and Death - puppets, the dead, the damned and the saved - meet again for the last supper, around a table with everyone in his place. On the table is a cloth, perfectly ironed and starched. All around, people maintain the poses of the Apostles in Leonardo's The Last Supper, even if their dialogues are trivial and do not correspond to the spiritual atmosphere. For a moment we have the illusion that art can transfigure reality and can impose its message of beauty and humanity even on greedy and corrupt people. But the rite of the last supper is not fulfilled because in the confusion the Priest has been thrown under the table. The last supper will go on without him, but no one will be able to perform in his place the ritual gesture of the ceremony. Blessing cannot be given, forgiveness cannot be granted. One by one, the soldiers with their puppets, and the members of the family, are pulled away behind the door, and on the stage only Kantor and the deportee, playing his song, remain. Kantor folds the cloth very carefully, paying special attention to avoid creasing it; and when everything is finished, and the cloth has become a parcel of white sheet, he puts it under his arm, as he would do with his sketches, while the music interrupts itself with a mechanical tone. The promise of hope is rendered mechanical.

Kantor's company used to play in the Krzysztofory Gallery in Krakow, a quite small, cellar space in which a group of painters and writers belonging to the Cricot 2 theatre met in a very special atmosphere mixing friendship, complicity, fun and implicit political resistance. With Wielopole, Wielopole, this group began a production for the first time in the conventional way. They had to perform not when they felt they were ready, but for a definite time in the theatre season. The request Kantor made for nine months of rehearsal upset the Florentine authorities, who nevertheless accepted his condition; but Kantor still provoked many scenes and shouting-matches, at the end of which he would declare that he was ready to give up and go back to Poland. The space he was supposed to work in was a beautiful deconsecrated church in the Oltrano, near the Gordon Craig Theatre, and Kantor was very happy with this proximity. But the church was not equipped to be a theatre. It was in use as a warehouse, and it was hard to make the authorities understand that even if Kantor's theatre was a poor one, making use of ready-mades, their financial assistance was still very important.

I attended the rehearsals for nine months, taking notes, observing, and very often stimulating the curiosity or suspicion of Kantor who, while welcoming a diary of the work in progress, also wanted to control its production. He arrived in Florence with some pictures of his family and with one scene already prepared - the scene of the marriage. For a long time he would show these to visitors. He wanted to use his personal memories, interwoven with the history of Poland. Very often he gathered the whole group and read out some text, some manifestos, or some thoughts on theatrical problems (about illusion, reality, or the space of imagination, which he called 'the space behind the door'). Sometimes he showed drawings of some characters or objects, like the camera which became a machine gun, or the bed which had the live priest lying on one side and his puppet-corpse on the other. To make these objects he needed specialist artisans and it was not easy to explain what was required. He also wanted some young Italian actors to join the Cricot 2 group, so he held auditions and chose six or seven, who then stayed with the company for many years.

After his readings on general subjects, he left his actors to improvise action, movement and speech around a theme which he had suggested and only when he was fully satisfied did he start to write. For his plays Kantor used the musical term 'score', justified in his view by the sound of words, of movements (he was very attentive to the noise of shoes on the stage), and of music. As remarked before, he would mix different styles and qualities of music. In Wielopole, Wielopole one finds patriotic music, religious songs, the mechanical Chopin, and Jewish songs, chosen not only for their beauty and meaning, but also their rhythyms.

If this score then exists, is it possible for the Cricot 2 theatre to go on playing without Kantor? After Kantor's death there were heated discussions and quarrels within the group to decide who should take his place. In the end, no one did, because it was impossible to achieve a general consensus. Some critics said that without Kantor on stage, the meaning of the play was no longer the same, and that for this reason it would be simply an exploitation of Kantor's success to go on playing without him. A small group of the Cricot 2 actors tried to put on some plays, but they did not manage to free themselves from Kantor's style, and so now those who still work in theatre are each trying to do something by themselves. The legacy of Cricot 2 has passed to the history of theatre, rather than to any one heir.

Kantor was very conscious of the importance of collecting all the documents of the history of his own activity and of the Cricot 2 performances. This attitude may be considered a contradiction to his wish to destroy institutions. Kantor thought of art as the place for marginality, like a circus caravan; a fragile shelter to protect people from the struggle of historical events. In this sense, the Cricot archives - the Cricoteka - as he wanted to organise them can be seen as a kind of funeral monument to his theatre. Perhaps we can view it as the beginning of a history that has yet to be realised.

Kantor probably followed the same idea when he made a bronze monument for his mother's and his own grave. This monument represents a classroom desk, with a seated boy with bare feet and an accompanying cross. He wanted the Cricoteka to become a living place, a place where the show of the dead would provoke questions about life. In the last part of his life, Kantor was preoccupied with the idea of constructing a coherence to his journey, to his 'road'; but such coherence only exists when a body of work is considered completely finished. In this way the idea of death which runs through all of Kantor's work is more present in his last productions, even if he nolonger spoke about a 'theatre of death'.

In his notes for Let the Artists Die!, Kantor wrote that art is a prison. This is a wonderful image, but very difficult to elucidate. Does he mean by this aphorism that the artwork exists only because of restriction? Bacon said that to create we must put freedom in gaol, to struggle against it. Kantor used the idea of death as a limit to the plurality of meanings. While the stratification of meanings and references constructs a coherent frame for the artwork, it becomes a prison, indeed, a funeral monument. Each image gets an momentary and enigmatic signification. Veit Stoss, the fifteenth century sculptor, gaoled in Nuremberg, is his alter ego in Let The Artists Die! All the characters represented in Today is my Birthday are avatars of the characters in the Witkiewicz productions, The Water Hen or Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, each of them stepping out of these previous performances. In his last shows, Kantor underlines his personal history, which he uses for material, as he had begun to do in Wielopole, Wielopole.

His family and his own personal experiences appear in Today is my Birthday and I Shall Never Return, as well as characters, objects and situations taken from his old plays. Odysseus is the main character of I Shall Never Return, recalling his production of The Return of Odysseus, performed in Krakow during the German occupation. In this play, Odysseus was a warrior, dreaming of his Ithaca, dreaming of an impossible return to his own spiritual and geographical homeland. Kantor experiences this loss of home and waits, seated like Penelope, like many of his other characters, for the realisation of a hope. Kantor's Odysseus knows that return is impossible, but his Penelope still goes on hoping.

In the Milan Lessons, Kantor said that the space of life exists parallel to the space of art: "the two of them converge, overlap, and coalesce, sharing their fate and destiny..." Kantor's life is an illustration of this statement. He died a few days before Poland saw the first free election in its history. By this simple political act, this country, which has seen itself throughout its history as special, became a country like any other. For Jarry, for instance, Poland was 'nowhere', existing only because Polish people existed. For Kantor, Poland was a contradictory homeland, all the time persecuted but becoming itself a persecutor through the pogroms. His message of a deep-rooted struggle between death and life, spiritual and material realities, and his belief in the absolute value of art for giving a meaning to life, will probably face difficulties in communicating to the new European and world situation, with the end of well-defined boundaries between opposing ideologies, which also marked the status of the artist in society. When he said 'let the artists die!', Kantor showed that the power of art is to be a point of resistance to both political power and human stupidity, which find their mutual consequences in war. And I am not sure that the contemporary art market will allow artists to die before having made a profit out of them.

To conclude: why Kantor today? What can Kantor's theatre provide for young people now, who want to dedicate themselves to the study or practice of theatre? If we expect Kantor to give us answers which would liberate us from the anguish of finding answers on our own, we are mistaken. I think that Kantor is a necessary experience - because being in touch with his world will teach us not to be afraid of our fears, which we may think we have overcome. The horrors of history are not - nor can they ever become - everyday and banal. Kantor teaches us to be afraid of how much we dare not evoke, of the things we wish completely to ignore. He opens our eyes, so that we can say that we're right to be afraid. This reestablishes real connections between things.

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